The Devil You Know
by Lorata
Summary: The question isn't "Why didn't District 2 join the Rebellion"? The question is: "Why should they have?" Why District 2 stood alone against the Rebellion.
1. Preface: Why?

I have a lot of feelings about District Two and the Rebellion. I have no qualms in saying that fandom gets them wrong most of the time, because so do the characters in canon. This fic was a long time in the making. It's also very, very angry. Watch your step.

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**Preface: Why?**

The people aren't interested in the whys, not yet.

Maybe later. It's too fresh, too raw, the wounds too gaping. It's too much in the chaos of reconstruction, the months and months and months of anarchy and counterrevolution and infighting, to sit down and analyze. There are no academics, remote in their offices with years of peace behind them - a peace hard won, surely, but no one can yet say whether it's deserved or even truly lasting - to sit and watch the propos, to scour the papers and personal effects of those lost in the rubble, confiscated in attacks, burned in the riots, and breathe voices back into the dead.

Not yet.

This is not the old Panem. The President Emeritus is dead, trampled to death in the square by a frenzied mob that was more than animal but less than human, his body tossed unmarked and unmourned. Some poor soul was paid too little to gather the shattered, bloody fragments of Alma Coin's skull and placed them in a box with her corpse. Coin's name suited her, some say afterward, for she was but the other side of the same.

This is not the old Panem, and questions are not punished here. People are welcome to question, and they do, but not the right ones. The questions all look forward, never back.

What do we do now?

Who will lead us?

How will the districts be represented?

Who's going to pay?

Who's going to pay?

_Who's going to pay?_

The blood of the Capitol children in the final Hunger Games that never was would not have been enough, and after the Mockingjay put an arrow in Coin's head and the collective consciousness of the people, they know it too. But it does not slake their lust for revenge, and soon they realize that the silly Capitol citizens with their painted faces and jewels embedded in their fingernails are not to blame.

The Victors certainly think so, but they are few, and fewer still are sane. No one sees the Mockingjay and her boy with the bread anymore.

The people decide that revenge is pointless, but restitution is just. The master is dead, but the dogs who sat by his table and gobbled the meat, leaving nothing but crumbs for the mice cowering in the walls - ah, they are still here. And so, in the absence of their tyrant, the anger turns - like a shoal of fish, like a murmur of starlings, like a brushfire, a sandstorm, a tornado, a mob - to those who supported the President through the end, who enjoyed his favour and never once thought to question what was laid in front of them.

For years the people of Panem watched their children die, their young blood splattered on the camera lens and soaking into the ground. While their children withered to nothing in the streets, or worked in the factories until their fingers shredded to pieces under the threads in the looms, or lost an arm to a boiler explosion, or perished in the heat with a twisting rain of lashes upon their backs after sneaking one sweet crunch of a grape on their tongue - while they suffered, while they died, while they took extra rations in the death game so they and their families would not starve this month, other children did not.

Other children played in the shelter of the mountains. Other children grew up sleek and strong and healthy, with good teeth and powerful limbs and fists that itched for blood and fingers that grasped knives from the cradle. While most children in Panem struggled to learn their letters and basic arithmetic when they weren't in the mines, the factories, the quarries, the mills, the fields - other children learned one hundred ways to kill another child with nothing but a shard of glass and a piece of string.

Other children murdered their children.

There are Career districts and meat districts. The meat districts, their children fought because they had to, they fought to defend themselves against the monsters, and their Victors aren't to blame, oh no. Even Tobias, from District Ten, who dug out the final tribute's eyeball, who skewered it on the end of his knife and held it up to the sky and laughed and laughed and laughed as the trumpets blared, no one blames him, because he was driven to it. The Games turned him, twisted him, and the Capitol left him alone in his Village with a house full of servants and not a single therapist, no medication but plenty of moonshine. It's not his fault.

He didn't choose this. _He_ didn't decide to major in child-murder at the child-murder academy, didn't sit down with his advisor and discuss whether to choose knife or sword or spear or mace or bare knuckles as his specialization while children in the other districts learned to count past ten by using their ribs.

No one remembered Tobias when he lived. No one mourned him when he drowned in his bathtub. But they remember him now. They mourn him now. Now he is a _symbol_. It's unclear whether it's any consolation to his pickled corpse.

The Careers wanted this. No one forced them to Volunteer - the people of Panem might not be mass-educated but they know what that word means, and no one stood in the square and put guns to the heads of those beautiful, smiling monsters and told them they had to. They went into it for the glory and the honour and the thrill of sacrifice; they were born to serve while the rest of Panem was born to suffer.

For those children, death was but another way to serve, a way to bring pride to their district. For Cato, the big, beautiful boy in the 74th Hunger Games who who stabbed a girl in the stomach and licked the spray off another beautiful girl's neck and grinned with the blood shining on his teeth and said it tasted like victory - for Cato, nothing could be greater than knowing he had given his all for the Capitol. The children he murdered died alone, purposeless, pointless.

Cato had eight long, glory-filled hours to appreciate exactly how much his sacrifice meant as the mutts gnawed him to pieces. It's a comfort not awarded to the boy whose head he tore from his shoulders, who died before he knew what happened.

Eight years out of ten, the victory went to Careers. Those districts, already fat with the blood they sucked from the Capitol's feet, took the prize money, the food, the public holidays, paid for by the blood of children who choked to death on coal dust and exhaust fumes and chemical dyes.

_Who's going to pay_?

The other districts demand retribution - _restitution_. They demand that the Career districts pay back their Victors' stipends, distribute them all out to the rest of the country in payment for the murder of their precious children. Only the Career districts, of course, because the other districts are not monsters; they have no price to pay, no guilt to assuage.

So no, they are not interested in the whys.

They are not interested in whys because -

1) they are irrelevant:

Why did District Two's children offer themselves up, year after year, with smiles and arms held high? Why did they give stirring speeches about duty while the others cried into their soft, gauzy dresses and vomited onto their shiny new shoes? Why did the conviction curl inside them so deep that until the end, down to their last gurgling, blood-filled breaths and staccato heartbeats, they did not denounce the nation that sent them there, that ate popcorn and watched them die?

2) they already know the answer:

Why did District Two not join the Rebellion? Because privilege, because wealth, because corruption and evil and stupidity, close your eyes and spin spin spin in a circle and pick one, any one, it doesn't matter. This one is easy, even the smallest, most stunted child born in the coal mines of District Twelve could answer.

and finally, one last why, one very important why, one crucial, linchpin, beating heart of a why, that they don't ask because

3) it doesn't occur to them:

It's a question that the other districts cannot even begin to fathom - a question that simmered in the hearts of the citizens of Two as the fire crept across the nation, and boils even now as a new country struggles to rise from the ashes and bones of the fallen - a question they don't consider because they're too busy not-asking why District Two never took a stand with the rebels -

The question is:

_Why should they have?_


	2. Chapter 1: Cato, Clove, Katniss

This piece is heavily inspired by azelmaroark's Until Your Last Heartbeat, particularly Parts 4 and 5, which I strongly recommend you read as a companion piece to this chapter. She's my co-brain for all things Hunger Games and District 2 especially, so a huge shout-out goes to her.

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**Chapter 1: Cato and Clove and the Girl on Fire**

Bert slides a beer across the bar. Flint catches it in his broad hand, tips the mug and raises his chin to Bert in thanks, fishes in his pocket for the crumpled bill he knows is in there somewhere, but Bert shakes his head. "I'll put 'er on your tab, Flint," he calls, and Flint's tab is long as his arm and older than his baby girl but Flint's good for it, or he will be, once they fix the roof, and Bert knows it. Flint's always good for it, it's just that times are tough and Mary ain't hardly got out of bed since Shalene was born and sometimes Flint just needs to get away and rinse the dust out of his throat and think about something else, anything else, for a couple hours.

It ain't a bad life, in the quarries. It ain't an easy one, either, fifteen hour days if nothing goes wrong and eighteen if it does - last time they had a cave-in Flint worked straight through from six in the morning until midnight - but they don't complain. They sure don't huddle in bunches at the Reaping like the sorry-ass coal miners in Twelve who don't have it that much worse. So it's coal instead of granite or limestone or marble, it's all digging rocks out of the ground, but you don't hear Flint and his buddies acting like their lives are a fucking tragedy.

"What's the score?" Flint asks, elbowing Kale, who's got his eyes glued to the TV. According to the Capitol, all of Panem gets Games-month off so they can watch, but it's not like they can bring in robots to mine the granite while everyone else snoozes, so him and the other quarry rats trade off shifts and keep each other informed.

"Same's when you left," says Kale without looking away from the screen. "Clove's got four, Cato's at five."

Flint feels a burst of pride. He works with a guy who traded shifts with Clove's pa, not that he's seen her since she was twelve, but still, it's good to know that their town's good for something. When she was little she used to pull the wings off butterflies, or so says Jake. "Who's left, besides ours?"

Kale takes a pull of his beer, sets it down and spreads out his fingers. They're rough and callused, like Flint's, and the veins in his forearm stand out when he pushes each finger back as he counts. "Girl from Five. Boy from Eleven." He rolls his eyes and runs his tongue across his teeth like a cat that's smelled something bad. "The Girl on Fire and Loverboy."

Flint mimes spitting on the floor, though it's not the kids' faults, not really. It's just that the Twelves this year are eating up the airtime, all because some moon-eyed baker's boy said he had a crush, like kids don't have crushes every day. Like such a stupid reason makes them more interesting than the bright, beautiful kids from Two who actually scrapped and fought and bled and deserve to be there. "That's two down from this morning. What'd I miss?"

The last time Flint got to watch, Twelve blew up the supplies at the Cornucopia on Three's watch, and Cato turned and snapped the kid's neck. After that the Pack went hunting for Twelve, and Flint's seen enough Games in his time to know the Alliance wasn't going to last much longer.

"One freaked out and left the Pack. One got Eleven, the little one. Twelve got One. One got Eleven with a spear, Twelve got him in the throat with an arrow. They'll recap it tonight, lots of boo-hooing. Think Twelve's gone catatonic or somethin'. Cato and Clove are taking a break."

Flint didn't like the One boy all that much anyway, too tall and too skinny and not quite handsome enough, and for a Career that meant second choice, probably got bumped up when the frontrunner got himself in an accident. Hell, maybe the kid caused it himself to go in, Flint doesn't know and he doesn't really care. But while Ones and Twos are rivals for a reason, they usually try to keep it out of the Pack until it splits. This one kept up with the sneering, little snide remarks like _oh ho ho don't they teach you monkeys to read_ and asking Cato to tell him how many tributes are left _if you can count that high that is, here lemme hold your sword so you can use both hands_.

Flint's money's on Clove. Cato's wild, unpredictable, he swings wide and moves rash and he has a Career's control, sure, but it's like laying a plank across a mountain of gravel and expecting it not to slip. He's raw and brimming with anger and he's strong, sure, and he ain't stupid - Twos don't actually make 'em stupid, no matter what the jokes are, he wouldn't get to that stage if he was - but he's too hot. He burns too fast, too much, like magnesium: hot, white and blinding, but nothing left when he's done.

Clove, now. Clove is mercury thiocyanate. Light her up and she'll take it, twist it and use it and just keep on growing. And maybe it's just because Flint's got a daughter of his own now and it's got him soft on girls, but he thinks Clove's got it in her. He thinks she could bring it home.

Flint leans back on his bar stool and watches, curling his hand around the front of his mug because his hands are too big to fit in the handle. Not much happening at the moment; Twelve's not on fire now but at least she's done crying, and she tears into a groosling while staring out at nothing. She watches the smoke from her signal fire with dead eyes, like little Eleven wouldn't have died anyway, like they could have skipped off into the sunset as best friends forever and ever. At least Twos understand how the game is played.

Five strips bark from a tree branch, peels the rough part off and sticks the green under-skin into her mouth. Her ribs stick out through her shirt. This one ain't gonna last much longer.

Eleven's still in his field, and Flint swears he looks better than he did when he went in. The lines of his cheeks don't look as gaunt. If he weren't a Two, Flint would be pulling for him; a big fella, honest muscles and honest head and sharp enough to stay out and let the others pick themselves off. But he ain't a Two, so Flint wishes him a quick death instead.

Loverboy's painted himself to look like a rock as the blood seeps out from a gash in his thigh, but even without the muck and mud on his face, Flint knows he's done for. He knows sepsis when he sees it, remembers it from when he was a boy and Uncle Brock stepped on a nail down in the quarries, went right through his boot and poisoned him because they couldn't afford the fancy shots from the doctor in the big city. It's a nasty way to go, and Flint doesn't envy Loverboy, who wouldn't be a bad kid out of the Games, just dumb. Maybe someone will come by and end it for him.

Flint decides to wait for the anthem, then pack up and go home, check on Mary - see if she maybe feels like sitting outside on the porch for a while tonight, if he carries her out so she don't have to walk - when history changes right in front of him.

Claudius Templesmith announces that both tributes from the same district will be declared the winners if they're the last two alive. Flint looks down into his drink - musta heard that wrong, Bert musta slipped him something stronger - when Templesmith repeats it. No mistake.

They can both come home. Cato and Clove can come _home_.

The sky in the Arena goes black as the Capitol anthem fades away and the logo disappears. The bar erupts into pandemonium.

Flint sucks in a long breath. The camera changes to Twelve, who says Loverboy's name in shock, then claps her hands over her mouth. Flint pounds his fist against the bar. "Nobody cares!" he snaps, and he tries not to yell at the screen because that feels a bit too much like cheering for a sports game, but he can't help it, not this time. He ain't the only one, anyway.

At least there's not much drama with Twelve crashing her way through the trees like a spooked boar, and her Loverboy's still unconscious by the stream, so the cameras don't stay on them for long. They cut to Eleven, a dark smear against the blackness of the sky, but the whites of his eyes show up clear enough as he rolls them. The rule change ain't gonna do him much good, and he stares up at the patch of the over-grid where his district partner's face hung a few minutes before. After a minute he shakes his head, looks back down and scrapes a stone over the blade of his scythe.

The girl from Five is next, and she rocks back and forth in the bushes, fingers splayed against her ribs, and cackles softly to herself. Ain't the first one gone crazy from the isolation, and she won't be the last.

Finally, _finally_ they move to Clove and Cato, and they roll the footage back a bit so the audience gets to see their reaction to the news. There's silence - the bar holds still, dead still like a collapsed mine after the final rumble of falling boulders stops, before the shock wears off and the wailing starts - then Clove looks up at Cato, eyes wide, to see if he heard it, too.

And then. And then - then Cato, giant, bloody-fisted Cato, Cato with clotted chunks of red smeared in his golden hair and arms even bigger than Flint's - Cato scoops Clove up, grabs her right in his arms and crushes her to his chest. Flint holds his breath - for a second he thinks Cato's actually crushing her, squeezing the life from her, but then Cato presses his cheek against her hair and her fingers grip his arms, and oh, oh _fuck_.

For a minute Flint thinks he's kissed her - which, holy _shit_ that is not a thing with Twos, not ever - but then the camera finds its focus in the dark and no, it's just a hug, except it ain't _just_ anything. Flint doesn't know what it is but he knows it sticks him between the ribs and won't pull out.

Cato's breath shudders out in a gasp, and he noses her hair and shifts, tugs her higher so she can bury her face in his shoulder. Her feet dangle off the ground. They don't kiss and they don't let go and they don't say anything, not for a long time, just hold each other like they were drowning and now they're not. And in a way it's better, because anyone can fuck, and the star-crossed lovers from District Twelve can make cow eyes at each other, and Cato could spend half the night with his tongue down that pretty One girl's throat before there was no more kissing and no more pretty, but this is different.

"Welcome back," Cato whispers into her hair.

"I've missed you," Clove says into his arm.

Cato runs his massive, blunted fingers through her hair and tells her he's glad they're on the same team again, and Flint feels like somebody's gone and whacked him over the head with a brick, leaving him reeling. He's seen a lot of Games in his time, more than these kids will be old enough to remember, that's for sure, but he ain't never seen anything like this. Twos know how to play, they know not to make chums when at least one of them is going home in a coffin, and they might not seek each other out to kill but that don't mean they won't do it if it comes down to it.

It could just be the emotions from the rule change, but Flint doesn't think so. Cato said _welcome_ _back_. That means this is old, older than the Arena, older than the training centre and older than the Reaping, and Snow only knows how far back it really goes. And this, this is so much better than a boy with an unrequited crush and a girl who's confused to know what to do with it. This is a knife and its target, a chisel into a fissure, and Flint's only seen this for about ten seconds but it feels more right, more real than anything he's seen from Twelve - and from Clove and Cato, too, ratcheted tight and moving together as twin hunters who always kept their distance - these past three weeks.

They've played him like his nana's busted old piano that he never figured out how to tune but couldn't bear to throw away. They could be playing him now, not like he'd know because he ain't Career even if he has watched some twenty years' worth of them. Either way, Flint's caring couldn't even piss out a match.

On screen, they talk too low for the cameras to hear, then finally Clove thumps him on the chest and Cato sets her down.

She tells him she gets the Girl on Fire. He asks her why she should let him have all the fun.

"Because," she says, and she glances at the camera with her mean little eyes like she don't know it's there, like she just happens to stare right at the screen and narrow her eyes like she's looking right at him. Flint knows Careers and he knows she's doing it on purpose, but it jolts him all the same. She smiles, wicked and slow. "I'll make it look good."

Flint always knew he liked her best, but now he doesn't have to choose.

The kids start talking strategy, and that's when Flint shakes himself, drains the last of his forgotten drink and slides off his stool. "Gotta get home to the missus," he says, and the men wave and wish her well.

"Tell her my wife's gonna bring over some of her famous roast tomorrow," says Ryland, and Flint would feel worse about the charity except he's got a baby girl now and it suddenly ain't so important to be proud.

"Will do," Flint says with a nod.

At home, the house is dark, and Flint picks his way through the rooms without barking his shins off the chairs or his hip off the table, which is something, until he gets to the bedroom. Shalene's in her crib, snuffling to herself, and she's awake but not crying, thank Snow for small mercies. Flint lifts her out and holds her against his chest, cradling her skull in his hand. She's so small in his hands, and he thinks of Clove, suddenly, dwarfed in Cato's arms, and she was a baby like this once - a little thing the size of her daddy's forearm with tufts of black hair - but that's not something any man who wants to wake up sane thinks about so he swallows it.

"You awake, baby?" he whispers, because he can't tell from Mary's breathing one way or the other.

"It's late, I was worried." He can see her now, the curve of her body under the blankets, facing the wall. "I turned off the TV after that little girl. Couldn't watch anymore."

"You don't have to watch nothin'," Flint tells her, stubborn, and he keeps Shalene tucked against his chest and slides into bed. He cards his fingers through Mary's hair. "Good news, though." He swallows, and maybe he shouldn't tell her, not with her moods up and down all over like thunderstorms off the mountains, but a little hope might mean she'll eat something. "They changed the rules today."

He waits, the breath he can't release pressing against his ribcage, but then Mary shifts, turns over and peers up at him, her face pale in the darkness. "What do you mean, they changed the rules?"

And so, Flint tells her. He tells her about the Capitol's generosity - "It ain't meant for them, obviously, it's for the lovebirds, but they don't deserve it and they ain't gonna get it" - and how as soon as Clove and Cato heard, a switch flipped and the two fierce, trained killers clung to each other like children. "I tell you, baby, I don't know what's going on in their heads or nothing, but it looked real."

"Well of course it was real," Mary says, and her voice trembles with tears like it usually does, but for the first time since before Shalene came out breech and he thought he was gonna lose them both right there in the house, there's a hint of the steel underneath that was the reason he fell for her. "They're just children."

Flint shifts a little, masking it by pretending that Shalene is fussy and needs a check. "They're Volunteers."

"Children," Mary says again, sharper this time, and if it means she's coming back to him then he'll argue with her all she wants. "It doesn't matter if they're trained, they're still frightened. And if they knew each other before it must be terrible for them." She struggles to sit up, and Flint arranges the pillows behind her, curls his free arm around her shoulders. "I want to see," she says, startling him. "They'll be on the recap station right now. I want to see them."

They are, and Mary watches the television and Flint watches Mary. When Clove and Cato turn and their eyes meet for the millionth and first time since going into the Arena together, Flint sees his wife drag herself a little way out of the darkness. When they embrace - when Cato finally sets her down, only to flop on her 'by accident' when they sit down to discuss strategy and she calls him a fuckface - Mary smiles, eerie and glowing in the light from the screen.

Mary settles in to sleep after that, and Flint strokes her hair and switches over to the live footage, just to check. Clove and Cato are hunting, like the Careers always do at night, but this time it's different. They still move with stealth and purpose that's too ingrained to throw away just because, but it looks to Flint like they're just passing the time - as they got the right, he supposes, given there's only four left and they'll all be hiding. Cato tries to stick a leaf in her hair without her noticing; Clove elbows him hard in the ribs and manoeuvres him face-first into a low-hanging tree branch.

They're _playing_. It takes Flint a second because he's so used to seeing them on the prowl, but for trained killers in the middle of a death game, they may as well be kicking around a ball in the gravel pits. Cato calls her "midget". She calls him "fucker". Both of them laugh, and it's not the kind of laugh they make when sliding a knife between someone else's ribs.

It's late and Flint's bone-tired, and exhaustion from the day's work seeps into his muscles and drags him down. He's on rotation again tomorrow, though it don't really make much of a difference to him since he wakes up the same time every day anyway. He shuts off the television and curls up with his best girl and his baby girl and lets sleep pull him under.

* * *

He wakes up a few minutes before the five a.m. shift siren, the way he always does regardless of whether he's working. It gives him enough time to sit up, get his head together, and stroke one finger down Shalene's face to wake her before the noise does, otherwise she'll wail like a sonofagun. She looks up at him with her dark eyes, face scrunched up in complaint, and Flint gives her his knuckle to gnaw on. That oughta hold her for a little while, let Mary sleep a bit longer.

It's a hot, sticky morning down here by the quarries, and the thin curtains they've rigged to keep out the dust don't even flutter against the sash. Flint sings a song to Shalene, getting her attention just before the blast tears the air, and it don't always work but this time it does, so that's something. She gets her tiny fingers around his thumb, and Flint looks at her with her tiny flat nose and tiny perfect ears and thinks, thank Snow he lives in District Two. The work may be hard and life might get shitty, but he will never, ever have to worry about his baby girl standing up on that stage, never have to watch her get torn to pieces by some kid with a spear, because that's why they have Volunteers.

The Capitol only told the Centre to withhold once, back in 53, when Two didn't do enough to crush the muttering of rebellion after the second Quell. It was way back, and Flint was just a kid, but nothing can erase the look on the girl's face when her name was called and no beautiful, athletic saviour stepped in to take her place. That's the only warning Two ever needed. Stay in line and their children stay safe. The other districts might not think it's fair, but nobody's stopping them from doing the same thing. Nobody says they can't make a deal to behave and save their little ones instead of grumbling away in the dark.

Flint ain't never had much sympathy for people what just feel sorry for themselves. Yeah, his life is hard, but the deal his district made means his kids stay alive and stay out of the mines, and that makes every busted knee and five a.m wakeup worth it.

He has a little time before he needs to get up, and so Flint flicks on the television, though he leaves the volume off. The Arena is a wash of grey, and a thin layer of frost rims the grass despite the temperature outside the dome, because the Gamemakers do what they want. No one's moving, and they keep cutting back between the tributes now, to highlights from the day before, just to keep things fresh

Loverboy shivers and convulses in the mud; his lips, chapped and peeling, form a word that Flint don't need the sound on to make out: _Katniss_. Flint really wishes someone would just come and stick a spear in him proper this time, get it over with, but little Eleven was the only one who knew is location and she's dead now.

Something startles the boy from Eleven awake; he jolts to a sitting position, scythe at the ready, but whatever it is must've been a false alarm. He lies back down, pulling a silver thermal blanket tight around his massive shoulders. He has ice crystals on his dark eyebrows. Back home he'll never have felt anything that cold before.

Fire-Girl sleeps the way she always does, dozing fitfully in a tree branch with a rope tied around her waist to lash her to the trunk. For a girl with absolutely nothing interesting about her - Flint ain't about to be captivated by a pretty dress, and it takes more than stepping in for her sister to impress a man who's seen kids go to their death for complete strangers - she's lasted this long, he'll give her that.

Five is awake and twitchy, moving through the underbrush, and she does what she's been doing every morning for the past two weeks: checking Twelve's snares before the other girl wakes up to do it herself. Five is smart, Flint will give her that, but smart won't win the Games this year, not with Cato and Clove. Even before, when only one of them would be coming home breathing, they weren't gonna kill each other with a wildcard missing, and now she's got even less of a chance. With Twelve out from tracker-jacker stings for days, it's been slim pickings for Five. Still, this morning she finds a rabbit, and Flint gives her props as she fishes it out of the snare and resets it so Twelve won't notice.

The cameras switch to Cato after that, conked out in a sleeping bag with his head pillowed on one of their packs. For a minute Flint thinks he's alone, but then he notes the dark hair just visible through over the edge of the bag at Cato's chest, and he clues in that they're sharing. That hasn't happened before, either. Cato and the girl from One slept curled up together the nights before she got herself stuck full of tracker jackers, but compared to the raw relief and open need he saw on these two's faces last night, Flint would bet his salary that Cato and the One girl were all for show, a bit of sex appeal to spice things up for the cameras.

Not too much exciting about watching them sleep, so soon enough the show switches to the early-morning commentators for their theories on the dramatic shift in the tributes from District Two, and that's Flint's cue to get up. He drags Shalene's crib over to the bed with his foot before putting her in it so it'll be easier for Mary to reach her if she gets hungry, and heads into their tiny bathroom for a quick shower. Water's scarce in summer, so he scrubs himself down with a hard sponge before turning on the spray, and as he scrubs his fingers through his cropped hair he can't help thinking how the other districts, the outer ones, think all of Two lives in privilege just because the Capitol favours them. They don't realize that privilege means a lot of things, and that money and fancy houses is just one kind. Flint will take five-minute showers and live with dirt ground into his fingernails for the rest of his life if it means they get to keep the Centre.

Mary shocks him by being up and in the kitchen when Flint makes his way there, and she pours him a mug of coffee and presses a kiss to the corner of his mouth. "You okay?" Flint asks her, shocked. He can't remember the last time Mary got up the same time he did, but he's pretty sure it was before Shalene. "You look happy."

"It's the tributes," Mary says, and she's pale and thin and she has to hold onto the counter for support but she's here, she's up, and she's smiling. "I realized that if they can keep moving day to day with everything that's going on with them, I could get up and make my husband some lunch."

Relief squeezes Flint so hard he has to fight to breathe, and once again he's pathetically, staggeringly grateful for those two little killers there in the Arena, for giving up everything they had so that his wife could find hope again. They'll never meet her, like as not, and sure as a rockslide will never hear her story, but it doesn't matter. They got her out of bed, and for that Flint can never pay them back. He just wishes he had two coins to rub together, never mind send to the Capitol as a sponsor gift. Maybe he can ask the boys, get a collection going. Wouldn't be much even if they all pooled together, but if District Eleven could send Twelve a loaf of bread like the recap showed, surely Clove's hometown could do the same for her.

That night he slips back into Bert's, though he doesn't go as far as the bar. He snags Ferris' sleeve. "Score?" he asks.

"Same," Ferris says, and his cheeks are flushed and he grips Flint's shoulder. "They took a break I guess, not like they don't deserve it anyway, been fishing all day down at the lake. Damn cutest thing I ever seen, it's like they're kids. Clove's got her knives, but Cato can't throw for shit and just keeps trying to grab 'em with his hands."

Flint grins. "All right, I better see to my girls," he says. That's all he needed to know, what the mood is so he can be prepared for however Mary might be when he walks in the door.

For the first time in what must be six months, there's food cooking when Flint walks in the door. He has to stop, take a second with his hand pressed to the warped wooden door frame, and let out several long breaths before he trusts himself to kick off his boots and head in. "How're the prettiest girls in Panem?" he calls out, and when Mary's laugh follows him out from the kitchen it's like he just spent the past fifteen hours lifting feathers, not hefting rocks the size of a ten-year-old.

"Got yourself some stew cooking," Mary says, and she's barefoot and her hair is loose and she's absolutely beautiful. Shalene burbles in her basket on the counter. Flint drops a kiss on Shalene's silky-soft cheek, then slips his arms around Mary's waist and nuzzles her hair.

"You okay to be standing?" he asks her. "Don't want you pushing it, now."

"Mmhmm." Mary pats his hand. "Been taking it easy all day, don't you worry. Just me and Shae watching the Games."

"What'd I miss?" he asks, and he doesn't let go of her even when she pulls away, keeps his hands curled on her hips as she dips a wooden spoon into the pot and holds it out for him to taste.

"The Twelves found each other," she says. "She dragged him into a cave, fed him some soup. They've been awful lovey."

Well, of course they have, what with the rule change meaning they don't have to hold it back anymore, and at least they'll have a day or so of that before the end. Flint can't wish them well, but he don't wish them nothing but suffering, either. Let them kiss for a while, it won't hurt nobody. "How're ours?"

"Having fun, I think," Mary says, and she adds some herbs to the pot before deciding it's done. "Most of the cameras are on the Twelves and their love story, but when we see the Twos, they look happy."

Flint ladles the stew into bowls, moves Shalene's basket over onto the couch, then picks Mary up into his arms and carries her over, despite her protests that she's fine. "I know you're fine, but that don't mean I can't carry you," he tells her, and he's gentle because better or not she's still hurting, still delicate, and the last thing he wants to do is jostle her too hard.

Flint turns on the television and changes it to the District Two channel, which should at least keep the minimum of the star-crossed coal miners off his screen. He's afraid too much of that will upset Mary. Instead he finds Clove and Cato, roasting their day's catch over a crackling campfire. He thinks back to the day they killed the girl from Eight and used her campfire to roast marshmallows, how Cato skewered them on the tip of his sword and ate them with the blood still drying on the blade. Now, Cato hands Clove a fish on a stick, and passes her a tin of salt they got from the sponsors and a wide leaf to roll it all in.

For the hundredth time since the rule change, Flint wonders which Cato is real: the boy whose hot breath teased the curls at the nape of One Girl's neck as he slid a hand up her shirt and told her how hot the girl from Nine's death made him; or the one who tousles Clove's hair and laughs when he nearly gets a stick in his eye for the trouble. Maybe it's both, who knows. Flint gets the feeling these kids are more complicated, more stuffed full of different ideas and contrasting images, than any of the adults he knows in real life. In the quarries it's pretty simple; you lift rocks, you have a drink, you go home to your wife or your girlfriend or your empty house, and start the whole thing over. He can't imagine what it must be like to fill his head with so many different lives all at once.

"So what do you want to do when we get home?" Cato asks, leaning back on his hands and looking up at the sky. No Parade of the Fallen tonight, no surprise announcements.

"Don't," Clove says, sharp, and Flint's with her. You don't go holler at the base of a loose mountainside, you don't kick a loose beam in a half-demolished house, and you sure as hell don't tempt the Gamemakers to send a bunch of mutts just because you're too cocky. Then again, if an eighteen-year-old boy with arms like tree trunks and a body that makes the Capitol piss themselves can't be cocky, no one can.

Cato rolls his eyes, but his jaw tightens. "Fine, be a spoilsport. What would you want to do _if_ we get home?"

Clove shoots him a look, but he just opens his eyes wide and innocent - as innocent as he can be, anyway, with five kills to his name, but it's easier now that he's been in the lake and washed the blood out of his hair and from behind his ear - and eventually she snorts. "Drink some juice," she says in a dry voice, and Flint barks out a laugh because she's got a sense of humour, that one.

"I'm gonna sleep," Cato says, and he keeps his tone light but his voice is hoarse and rough with exhaustion anyway, like a blanket dragged over the rocks until it wears thin in the middle. None of them have had a good, solid night since they went in, almost three weeks ago. Flint's pretty sure the both of them sleeping at the same time this morning was a mistake. "Seriously, every blanket we've got, I'm just gonna roll up in them, and anyone who wants me to do anything can fuck off."

Clove shakes her head. "It's July and you're already a furnace, you moron. You'll sweat to death."

"So I'll turn up the air conditioning," Cato counters, and he jostles her shoulder. "Shut up, midget, you don't hear me ragging on yours."

"That's because yours is stupid, and mine is juice, and juice wins," Clove shoots back. They toss insults back and forth, insults that sound almost like pet names and are, at the very least, ones they've used on each other for a long time, because Clove calls Cato 'fucker' the same way that Mary calls Flint 'oaf'.

That night, after they put Shalene down in her crib, Mary curls her fingers behind Flint's neck and draws him down for a kiss like as they haven't had in months. It isn't the first time she's kissed him at all since Shae's birth, but it is the first time she's kissed him like this, slow and full of promise, and when Flint trails a hand over her side and skirts the hem of her shirt, she doesn't push him away. Far from it. Afterward, curled against each other in the late-night heat, sticky and sweaty and sated, Flint thinks it's a probably-dumb, definitely-inappropriate thing to thank two strange teenagers for, but he does anyway.

* * *

Two days later - two days of Cato and Clove and half-hearted tribute-hunting that turns up no one, two days of frolic and hushed, uncertain talk of Talents, of wrestling in the sand and throwing knives at squirrels; two days of Twelve watching her Loverboy slip closer and closer into the dark; two days of Mary glowing brighter, smiling more, taking Shalene in her lap and blowing raspberries on her round little cheeks - Flint's free shift comes up on the rotation. A full twenty-four hours of nothing to do but sit with his girls and watch Cato and Clove bring it home.

Flint's day off comes just in time for him to catch the broadcast of the Feast. Just in time to watch Clove die.

The thing about hope is that it's tenuous. It's slippery, like the sides of a mine in the dead of winter when the rocks are lined with frost and chunks of ice. It's like the cobwebs that Mary knocks down from the corners of the ceiling with her broom, because she hates the look of them in her house even when Flint points out the spiders do nothing but eat bugs. It's the slow burn of red, orange, and pink across the sky before it all fades to black. Hope changes as quick as the weather here at the base of the mountains, where one minute the wind is light and teasing on your face, and the next it's driving shards of ice hard into your skin and sending rivets of rain down the back of your shirt.

The Arena and hope are a lot alike.

It all happens so fast. Clove has Twelve on the ground, and she keeps pulling knives out of nowhere as she reels out a terrifying speech that's less scary because of what she's saying and more for the calm, almost blasé way that she says it. Twelve struggles beneath her on the ground, but her bow is gone, out of arm's reach, and Clove has her hands pinned and a knife at her throat and there's no way the Girl on Fire is going to twirl her way out of this one.

Except that the camera changes, and Mary jerks in Flint's arms because this stuff with Clove and Twelve, that's television gold, no way would they cut away to Eleven when he's doing nothing but running, except oh, oh _fuck_, that's the Cornucopia in the corner of the screen.

Clove never misses. She makes every kill she aims for, hits every target, delivers every line with practiced ease. She only makes one mistake the entire time she's in the Arena.

Too bad all it takes is one.

Her mistake is this: getting so wrapped up in her big speech to Twelve that she forgets to check where she is. Eleven's giant fist twists itself in Clove's jacket and rips her off Twelve while she's in the middle of dragging the tip of her knife over Twelve's lips, and he crushes her in his arms, her feet dangling off the ground, just like Cato did when Templesmith's voice changed everything. Except not like that, not like that at all, because Eleven's eyes are wide and crazed and his giant arms squeeze her hard enough that she cries out, and she'd fanned out all her knives to make a good show for Twelve and has nothing left.

Eleven throws Clove onto the ground, screaming at her about the little girl, his district partner, and Flint can't move, can't do anything but clutch Mary tight as her breath comes short and ragged. He has a rock twice the size of Shalene's skull clutched in his enormous fist. Clove's eyes flicker to it, then her whole face contorts and she screams for Cato.

Shalene starts wailing at the sound. Flint wonders for a hysterical second if Shalene feels a connection, because for the first time in weeks, through the blood and the steel and the tracker jackers and the fire, through all of that Clove has never sounded anything but the well-trained killer that she is, but now she sounds every bit a child. Her voice is high, hysterical, and it trembles and cracks as she skitters backwards on all fours, and she's scared. The implacable Clove is _scared_, and not just scared but terrified stiff and brainless, because otherwise she would have rolled away and run off instead of scrambling on her hands and feet like a confused crab.

The cameras cut to Cato, waiting in the woods as lookout. His head snaps up at the sound of her voice, and Flint sees the horror smack him full in the face. "_Clove_!" he shouts, and his voice, too, is way too high and out of control as he tears through the trees after her.

_They're children, _Mary said the night hope blew its sweet breath over the Arena and down through the mountains of Two into its citizens, into Flint, into his marriage.

They're just children.

The rock bashes in the side of Clove's head like it's made of aluminum. Her body falls to the ground in a broken heap.

Eleven and Twelve have a conversation that Flint can't hear because his head spins too hard for him to make it out. The toe of Clove's boot pokes out from the edge of the frame.

No cannon. No Cato. Not yet.

Eleven grabs District Two's pack from the Cornucopia and runs. Twelve takes off in the opposite direction.

Cato crashes through the line of trees and skids to a stop by Clove's body. Twelve hesitates just long enough to see him drop to his knees before she's gone, too. "No, midget," Cato rasps out, tossing the spear aside. "C'mon, stay. Stay with me." He pulls her head into his lap even though you never move a person with a head injury because it don't matter, not one like this, and there's not that much blood on the outside but Flint's seen his share of accidents and he knows what that means for what's going on inside her skull.

Mary turns her face into his chest and sobs, and Flint should turn it off - it's his wife and she's just clawed her way back from months of skirting the abyss but he can't, he has to watch this because Clove is dying and Clove is Two and Flint is Two and Twos look out for each other, they always have, and he can't save her and he can't help her but he can watch, and not watch like those fuckers in the Capitol with their popcorn and their betting sheets, but really watch, feel the pain in his gut like Cato stuck him with his spear and popped his insides. He has to watch.

Clove owes Flint nothing, but he owes her this.

Cato pets her hair with hands the size of her head, bends over double so he can press their foreheads together and talk in a voice too low for the cameras to catch. The line of his shoulders is taut, trembling from the effort of controlling himself, and Flint has the insane thought that skin is all that holds people together, that without skin they'd all just fly apart, the bones and the blood, and Cato's skin seems to be just a hair away from bursting with the rage that's crawling through him.

The words that the microphones do pick up are gruesome, threats and promises of violence that Flint in his twenty-five-some-odd years of watching the Games has never even heard of, and Cato says them in the same tender tone that Flint used when he stroked Mary's cheek and called her beautiful the night he took her out to the hill at the edge of town, told her to look up at the stars, and promised to rip all of them down from the sky if she'd be his wife.

_I swear to Snow I'll move the moon for you,_ Flint had promised, clumsy but sincere. Mary had smiled and ducked her head.

_I'm going to tear out his fucking liver and shove it down his fucking throat_, Cato vows, with every bit as much conviction. Clove smiles up at him, her eyes glassy, and trails bloody fingers down his cheek.

Sometimes Cato's expression turns ugly and his words growl and dive down into his throat and his eyes burn, and when that happens the camera cuts away for a few seconds - to Twelve, skirting the riverbank back to the cave; to Eleven, pounding the ground to his field - and Flint wonders what Cato's saying, what could possibly be more disturbing than what's happening right now that they can't show it, but it always comes back to the two of them, alone in their own world, a world that's disintegrating underneath them while somewhere in a big white room a Gamemaker's hand hovers over the button that signals the _boom_ of a cannon.

Mary's tears soak through Flint's shirt. Shalene's still wailing, but Flint can't make himself get up and go to her. He's fixed on the screen, and Cato holds Clove's face in both his hands and vows to kill the others for her as her eyes flutter closed. And then there's nothing left, no more promises, no more bargains, no more begging her to stay with him, nothing but _I love you_ and _gonna kill them_ and Clove just keeps smiling, still and sweet as her blood soaks into his lap and the grass around him and her chest stutters with the effort of keeping her here.

The cannon fires. Cato stands up, back and shoulders straight as Twelve's bowstring. He picks up his spear and marches off in the direction that Eleven fled, and President Snow himself could come and offer Flint all the money in every bank in all of Panem to trade places with Eleven for an hour and Flint would run in the opposite direction until his legs fell off.

Cato disappears into the forest. The camera changes to Twelve, crawling into the cave and jamming a syringe into Loverboy's leg, and Flint is so sickened that they expect him to care about this insipid, childish excuse for a love story when the greatest one he's ever seen - the greatest one Panem will ever see - just burst into flame back at the Cornucopia, that he wishes Cato would find Twelve now and tear her head from her shoulders. But Clove's gone, and all the Capitol cares about now is their star-crossed lovers with their little stories of bread and pigtails and birds singing, and all of it means nothing.

Flint turns the television off, and the remote is heavy and burns his hand like coals and he can't hold it anymore, and so he throws it across the room where it smashes against the wall. Mary pulls away from him and curls in on herself, and Flint forces himself to stand and pick up Shalene, who's screaming and red-faced and furious, her little fists waving in impotent baby rage.

"It's okay," Flint says, and he brings her up against his shoulder and rubs her back and stares at the grey screen of the deactivated television. "It's okay, baby. It's okay."

It's not okay. Nothing's okay. Mary cries into her hands and Flint has nothing, absolutely nothing, to comfort her.

* * *

Flint slips away the next morning at the siren. He checks the television just for a second, to see if there's been any change, but all he sees are the lovers from Twelve sleeping peacefully, all signs of infection gone; Eleven wide awake and shaking in his field, sickle out, turning to snap around at every sound; Five checking another snare and finding it empty, her wide eyes desperate and red-rimmed; and Cato, or what's left of Cato, marching through the Arena with sword in one hand and spear in the other, _going to kill them, going to kill them_ drumming through his body as his boots hit the ground. He still has his blood on her. If he wins, Flint's not sure if he'll ever wash his hands again. How he ever could.

He turns off the TV and leaves Mary in bed - he gave her one of the pills he had to take on four extra shifts to get, working until he tore a muscle in his shoulder, and she went down quick after that and should stay down until around noon. Daisy, Brim's girl from next door, promised to come by after breakfast and stay with her so she won't be alone, and Flint would rather do it himself but he's gotta go to work and that's that. Besides, a little girl died last night so his little girl won't ever, the least he can do is his job.

Not much chatter in the quarries today. Most everybody saw what happened, and the ones what didn't have already heard, and absolutely nobody wants to talk about it. The work ain't any harder today than it was before Clove died but it sure feels like it, and Flint pictures the coal miners in Twelve applauding when Eleven bashed Clove's skull in and he feels sick all over again. The other districts, they hate the Careers and that's no secret, they hate them because of the training and the privilege and the smiles they paste on their faces when they kill but what does all that matter? In the end it all comes down to who's got the bigger rock, and all Clove's wicked smiles and flayed squirrels and her face in Cato's shoulder couldn't stop it.

He thinks of all the babies being conceived in Twelve this week - babies they can't none afford to feed, mind - that'll grow up named _Katniss_, and a sour taste fills his mouth that not even the granite dust can overpower.

Around four, the foreman stops them. "Boys, let's pack it up and go," he says. "Ain't nobody feels like working today. We can pick it up tomorrow no problem."

It ain't bread, like District Eleven managed, but it's all the people of Clove's hometown can do. Nobody argues, and they shut it down and trickle back into town in a silent line.

Flint stops by the bar on the way home. He uses the phone in the corner to call his house, and when Daisy answers and says Mary's still sleeping and Shalene's an angel, Flint decides to grab a drink first. Why not. He orders the worst thing Bert's got and Bert hands it to him without a word. It tastes like piss and motor oil and that's about right.

"Score?" Flint asks dully. TV's on but he can't look, not yet.

"Six for Cato," says Rook next to him, and Flint glances over. Rook thins his mouth. "He got Eleven 'round two this afternoon. Cut him open, peeled his ribs right off his body, punched him in the lungs, all sorts of sick shit. There ain't nothing left of that boy now. Whatever was, it died with her."

Flint's not surprised. "Five?"

"Still hiding. Lovebirds got themselves a nice feast from the sponsors."

Of course they did. Flint finishes his drink - spits on the ground once he's through the door - and heads home. Mary's awake but back to the way she was before, staring at the wall, and Flint curls up in bed behind her and strokes her hair and calls her every pet name he knows but none of it makes her stir. He closes his eyes and tries his best to keep the tension from his hands as he rubs her back.

The next night there's another face in the sky, the girl from Five, and the recap shows her popping toxic berries into her mouth and convulsing on the ground. Flint shudders. Nightlock is one of those invasive plants that gets everywhere, from the woods of Twelve all the way to the mountains of Two, and the first thing Flint's gonna do as soon as Shalene's old enough to go outside is teach her not to go anywhere near it. A smart girl like Five not recognizing the most well-known poison plant in Panem is terrifying. The urban districts freak him the hell out.

That leaves just Cato and the lovebirds, then, and a chill runs through Flint that makes him clutch Shalene closer even as she sleeps. Chances are this is it. With Cato's humanity burning away step by step, the skin falling off and leaving the flame-licked bones clean, the Gamemakers aren't likely to want to draw this out - but more than that, Flint hopes they don't. Because with every day that passes Cato's turning more and more the monster, the final dragon for the heroes to defeat, and that's even worse than death.

Twelve cradled little Eleven and sang to her about valleys and meadows and the whole nation wept to see such innocence lost. Cato held his partner's smashed-in head in his lap as her blood and brains stained his pants, and he sang her to sleep and death with tales of blood and vengeance and he kept his promise in the end. One of these things is not like the other except it is, it is, because two little girls are dead and the boys who killed them are dead and the ones who had the courage to love them are still alive. Except it's easy to love a little girl with big doe eyes who danced in the trees and wore gossamer wings on stage. It's something else to love the one who slid her knives into a boy's throat and blew him a kiss as he choked on his blood, but Cato did, and Flint did, and all of this is wrong.

Cato deserves more than to be the final hiccup on the lovebirds' road to Victory. Flint looks at the screen, sees the boy with the gore-smeared face and death's-head grimace and knows he'll be lucky to get even that.

It's Flint's day off again, go figure, when the whole thing ends. Mary can't watch but Flint has to, and he don't trust himself to be in the same room with his girls when it goes down, so he calls Daisy again and heads back to Bert's when the three remaining start making their way back to the Cornucopia. "Won't be long," he tells Daisy. It's ending today and Flint knows it. He feels it in his bones like his granddad used to say about the rain an hour before the clouds swirled in. He gets to Bert's just in time to see the Gamemakers make their final play.

Idiot Twelve thinks the mutts are for them. Of course she does. To her it's all for them, the star-crossed lovers, the Girl on Fire and the Boy with the Bread, this whole damn show's been for them, why wouldn't it be, but Flint knows an execution when he sees one. And when Cato looks down from the Cornucopia into the crazed eyes of the mutt with a scruff of dark hair and a 2 on its collar, Flint watches as every last breath of the boy who tugged Clove's hair and pushed her into the sand disappears, and he knows Cato sees it too.

When Twelve's arrow takes Cato down and Loverboy knocks him to the ground, the whole bar lets out a collective cry. Bert stops serving, the boys quit asking, and all the games of cards or dice or knucklebones or darts that the people been playing to keep their minds off it, all that dies. Silence settles over the bar like the dust after a rockslide, and it's over, it's all over.

It's over, but Cato still fights. He fights, and damn it, he's beautiful, the kind of beauty that squeezes Flint right in the chest and yanks the tears from his eyes in a way that ain't happened since his baby girl squalled for the first time. Anyone else would look into the face of death - into the mad, mad eyes of the girl he loved, eyes that got torn out of her face and stitched into the face of this mutt-monster, as she dives for his throat - and give up, not like it would be hard, but Cato doesn't. Flint ain't sure if he's stubborn, crazy, well-trained, or just don't care, but Cato fights them, and he takes down mutt after mutt after mutt with the short-sword he had strapped to his leg.

He is beautiful, and Flint will smash the teeth of any fucker who dares say otherwise.

Cato fights for a whole hour, sixty Capitol-damned _minutes_ against the best, most twisted end the Gamemakers could engineer for him, with nothing but a piece of metal the size of his forearm. He fights as they jump on him and tear at his flesh and their fangs snag on his clothes or the body armour that ain't gonna save him but will make it last longer. He fights as the lovers shiver and cling to each other up in safety like the _cold_ is the worst thing that could happen. Flint hates them.

He fights until he can't fight no more and what mutts he didn't manage to kill or hurt too bad drag him back into the Cornucopia.

"Now it'll be over," someone says in a hoarse, raw whisper, breaking the silence. "They'll end it now, thank Snow."

They don't end it. Not the mutts, not the Gamemakers, and the cameras stick nice and close to the mouth of the horn so the viewers can see every hunk of skin and muscle they tear away from his hands, his neck, his ear, and they leave the microphones to catch every begging moan.

Night falls. The anthem plays. Cato's missing six fingers, one foot, and half his ear. Fire-Girl fusses over Loverboy's leg while Cato punches the smaller Eleven-mutt between the eyes with the stump of his ruined hand. They whisper comforting nothings into each other's ears and Flint wishes the big Eleven mutt would just jump and take them down, but no, no, that's not how this story ends. The heroes defeated the giant.

Twelve shivers against her boyfriend's chest. "Cato may win this thing yet," she whispers through chattering teeth, and it takes Flint a second to get what she means because it's so colossally fucking _stupid_ that his brain can't take it. She's talking about the temperature. She's talking about dying from the thrice-damned _chill_ before there's not enough left of Cato for them to take home and crown.

"Don't you believe it," says Loverboy with the kind of fierce bravery that can only come from someone self-centred enough to believe that braving a little cold and blood loss is even on the same continent as being chewed alive.

"You've got to be _fucking_ kidding me!" someone explodes, and a tankard shatters against the floor. Bert says nothing about the mess.

Hours pass and finally Cato stops fighting. The inside of the Cornucopia is splashed red and dripping with his blood in the dark, barely a hint of the original gold when the moonlight arcs through the clouds, and Cato slumps back against the ground, gives up as they tug at his arms and peel the first strip of body armour away. His eyes are glassy in his torn face.

Somewhere behind Flint, a grown man bursts into quiet sobs. He ain't the only one. Flint's vision blurred ages back, and ain't nobody saying nothing.

Finally Twelve has the decency to remember that a boy is dying underneath her, though from the look on her face it seems like she's thinking more about how much this sucks for her to have to hear it. "Why don't they just kill him?" she asks.

Loverboy shakes his head. "You know why."

Flint does. He's nowhere near convinced they do.

Beside him, Rook, who showed up after his shift and ain't even seen the half of it, slams his fist against the bar. "You're the one with the fucking bow!" he shouts at the screen. "Why don't _you_ fucking end it?"

"Because," says someone else, and it's Ryland with dead eyes and dead voice and an untouched drink in front of them. "That would be taking responsibility, and Twelves are the victims, remember?"

Ryland was always a little quieter, a little smarter than the rest of them. And he's right, because Twelve put her last arrow in Loverboy's fucking tourniquet, and so they keep on shivering and keep on clinging and calling to each other and fighting to stay awake as the moon creeps across the sky and more and more of Cato disappears into the mutt's gaping maws.

Last call rolls around, but Bert doesn't bother. It's three in the morning and they're all awake, frozen in their seats and staring at the screen, and they'll pay for it tomorrow when it's time to work but Flint can't bring himself to leave and neither can anyone else. Daisy hasn't called - none of their wives or girls have - and Cato's inability to give up and die has the whole town gripped in a terrible paralysis.

Now and then Cato speaks, and it's never more than a word or two - the most common are 'Clove', 'no more', 'I can't' and 'I'm sorry' - bubbling up through the blood and half-intelligible in his ruined mouth, but whenever he does another man breaks down crying. Devon once put his own shoulder back into place while waving away a belt or glove to bite down on, but when Cato chokes out a mangled _please_, Devon buries his face in his hands, his entire body shaking.

It's not until the sky turns light that Loverboy clues in that they might actually be able to speed things up, but by then Flint is numb with horror and rage and all he can think is _about fucking time._ Flint listens to the lovebirds justify their hoursand hours of doing absolutely fucking nothing with a half-assed comment about Cato being too far from the mouth of the Cornucopia, as if the whole theme of these damn Games hasn't been that the Girl on Fire is wicked with a bow. 'Preternatural', one of the comments called it after she took down two grooslings with one shot, but nope, can't kill a six-foot-five two-hundred-pound boy who ain't even moving anymore. Sounds legit.

The cannon fires. The bar lets out the breath it's been holding one way or another for the past eight hours. The wake-up siren cuts through the ensuing silence.

The lovebirds embrace, but Bert reaches up and shuts off the television. "Show's over, boys," he says, and no one argues. Nobody begs to see the Twelves get their happy ending, though Flint does hope the Gamemakers revoke the decision and return it to only one Victor. Let Twelve feel the gut-twisting punch of hope destroyed. He tries not to think about the other districts, who won't care which one of the lovebirds will win just as long as it's not one of the monsters from Two.

Flint drags a hand over his face and pushes himself off the barstool, gradually aware the other men on his rotation are doing the same. Exhaustion presses at his eyes and digs hooks into his shoulders but it don't really matter. Another year, another twenty-some kids shipped off home in coffins, though this year they're missing their eyeballs so that's new.

This time the foreman shuts down the mines at noon. Flint heads home to his girls, doing his best to shrug off the disappointment and the sickening taste of injustice in his mouth.

He hears, soon enough, that the Gamemakers did try to change the rules back, but the Girl on Fire outsmarted everyone again with a handful of poison berries. They play it off like she was so in love with her boy that she couldn't live without him, but Flint knows what he saw. He saw the lovebirds running for the Cornucopia. He saw her forget all about him, saw her leave him behind. Saw her face when she remembered and tried to smooth it away.

It's not real. Maybe for the boy, but not for the girl. Maybe the painted Capitol floozies believe it, but not Flint. Not a man who found the love of his life in a tiny diner when he was seventeen and knew right then she was the prettiest girl that ever walked the earth, but knew he had to wait because a dumb kid like him didn't deserve a girl like her. Not a man who moved heaven and hell to make himself good enough for her, not when he and Mary's house is small and they're poor as dirt but none of that matters when she looks him in the eye and smiles. Flint knows love. These kids don't know shit.

Cato and Clove died in the dirt for a love story that ain't even true, for a girl so bursting with love that she let another get torn to pieces the whole night while she didn't do a damn thing.

Flint doesn't begrudge Twelve their win, not exactly. Two's got its share of Victors and Twelve's only got Abernathy, so fair enough. He'd even be happy for them, in a sad sort of way - Two understands better than most of the districts about sacrifice and loss and practicality - but he can't get past it, not this year, not that girl. Not the one with a bunch'a gears and calculations where her heart should be.

He's glad to hear the rule change will never happen again, no matter how special the story. He's glad that the star-crossed lovers ruined it for everyone else forever. If Cato and Clove couldn't have it, no one else will deserve it ever again.

Flint doesn't watch the rest of the ceremonies. None of them do, though maybe a couple turn on the TV out of a sense of masochism before flicking it off again. He has a sick girl and a baby girl, and it kills Flint to see the hope that started to blossom in Mary's cheeks get cut off like that. He spends every minute he can with them at home, and as the air turns crisp and the leaves turn, the cloud finally starts to slide from Mary's shoulders and she remembers how to smile again. When Shalene turns a year old, Mary coos and sings and pulls Flint in for a long kiss right there in front of all their friends, and that's good enough. Good enough.

The whispers take longer to reach Two than they do the others, but they do get there. One day in the quarries, one of the younguns - idealistic, dissatisfied and stupid, like so many kids are these days - turns to Flint in a low whisper and says, "So whatcha think about that Mockingjay?"

Flint digs his shovel hard into the ground, shoving the point into a fissure and digging until it splits the rock in half. He kicks one half away down the hill, turns and spits on the piece that's left. "That's what," he says.

"Hear fuckin' hear," calls Rook.

When the Mockingjay shows up on his screen and starts talking about _injustice_ and _murder_ and _unfairness _and asks them to follow her, to _trust_ her, Flint throws a bookend right through the television screen. They never bother to get a new one.


	3. Chapter 2: Brutus & the Quarter Quell

**Chapter 2: Brutus and the Quarter Quell**

Reaping Day.

Twenty years ago to the day, Lyme stood here in the square, the weight of her Centre bracelet heavy like a promise on her wrist, the golden bead marking her as a Volunteer glinting in the sun. Forbidden to fidget like all Centre trainees but especially as the 55th Games' chosen tribute, Lyme had dealt with her nerves by flicking her wrist to the side, sending sunlight bouncing off the beads and into a Peacekeeper's helmet visor. He'd twitched, shaking his head, and Lyme had hidden a smile and turned back to the stage.

Then, Lyme had burned with purpose, the surety of her training the only thing beating back the fear. Then, Lyme had known it would be her. She'd had no regrets, no lost moments, no sense that she should have done this or could have done that because she known for months that she would be the one bringing glory to her district. The fear had come later, in the darkness the night before the Arena, after the interviews and the training score, when Lyme lay alone in her bed with her muscles scrubbed and gleaming and traces of war paint still clinging to her cheekbones, when she twisted her fingers in the luxurious sheets and thought that this could be the last bed she ever slept in.

It wasn't, of course. Lyme brought pride to her district with her living, breathing self, not packed up in a box in the cargo area of the train, and over the next twenty years she never stood in the square again. She stood in the Victors' Box instead, up by the stage with her fellow victors, a club marked with matching tattoos and body counts and scars they still felt whether the Remake Centre erased them or not.

She's never stood in the square like this, the concrete space empty of children, of any certainty except that one of them won't be here this time next month. Never shoulder to shoulder with the only people who could ever hope to understand her because they all went through the same hell and crawled back out.

Lyme doesn't look at the rest of them. She can't. She stands between her former mentor and one of her Victors, three generations of Twos in one solid line, and their elbows press together and that will have to be enough. There's room for them to spread out, what with the square being built for thousands and holding less than thirty, but they stick together anyway. It's not huddling. It's solidarity. That's all it is.

To her left, Claudius twitches his hand and links their little fingers, and in a normal year that would be an unforgivable weakness in a Victor who's been out for eight years, plenty of time for even the worst of them to heal. But this isn't a normal year, is it, and so Lyme curls her finger tight against her palm, trapping his hand against hers.

Nero, on her right, is a monolith of strength and silence, but even without looking Lyme knows that every line of his body is taut, that his muscles are coiled and ready and that it doesn't matter because he can't fight his way out of this one. No sponsors are going to drop down a miracle from the skies and save them, not this time.

Lyme looks up at the stage, both strange and all too familiar from this angle, and she wishes, for a brief second before banishing the thought to the place in her mind where she keeps things that aren't productive, aren't helpful, that she hadn't chosen to mentor boys after her first. If they call any of her Victors, other than Artemisia, there's nothing Lyme can do about it. No way for her to step in and take their place, which is what the mentors agreed last week by tacit agreement.

Brutus stands ahead of her to her left, and he's in the same boat as Lyme, nearly all his Victors being girls. It's not what anyone expected from Two's most illustrious mentors of their generation, that the giant Brutus would choose the sharp, nasty girls, and Lyme the raw, needy boys, but it is what it is, and there's no time for regrets now. For all but one of them, there will be plenty of time for that later.

Only one. Not two. Whatever happens, they will not lose two. They didn't have to make that promise; it ripples beneath all of them in a wordless snarl. This punishment is not for them; they won't let it take everything they have. They will not be bowled over as collateral damage from the outer districts' reprimand.

The Capitol is not punishing District Two and its Victors, but it didn't reach out a hand to save them, either, and Lyme lets that thought wash over her like a wave, not chasing it. She's used to these thoughts; anyone who's mentored as long as she has - eighteen years, as many as she was alive when she killed nine tributes in the Arena - is bound to have them once or twice. It's better not to make a big deal out of it, just let them happen and let them fade.

Lyme doesn't listen to the speech. She tries, but as soon as the usual platitudes about honour and glory reach her ears, they stir up a fire inside her that, once fanned, she will never be able to quench, and so Lyme turns it off. She looks at the sky instead, the blinding blue and white, the glare of the sun. The trickle of sweat between her shoulder blades. Claudius' hand in hers, gripping so tightly he nearly dislocates her finger.

The escort steps up to the microphone. Lyme has seen five of them - Two never keeps them for very long, it being a prestigious position, and the escorts cycle through as incentive for others to work hard - and she doesn't bother to remember this one's name. They're all ridiculous, like good, solid District Two names with glitter and syrup tossed over them. "Now I know you Twos are big on your power to both sexes," he says, waving a hand, "But let's start with ladies first anyway, shall we? For tradition's sake."

Tradition. _Tradition_. Lyme's mouth goes sour. In front of her, Brutus flexes his hands, curling them into fists, then splaying his fingers out flat, and that's the strongest indication of dissent she's ever seen from him. Brutus is District Two the way the mountains and the trees are District Two, and while Lyme shuts out the Games in the off-season Brutus charges in head-first, never letting himself forget. To Brutus, complacency is every bit as dangerous as a snare in long grass.

"Enobaria," calls the escort.

Lyme tenses. Enobaria is in the generation after her, and her return to sanity was slippery and coated with blood. If she goes back into the Games, into that headspace, it's very likely they'll never be able to pull her out. Someone saner should take her place, make sure she stays away from it - but Enobaria is one of their best, and she might be crazy but she's young and strong and fast, and if they have any hope of one of their women winning, it's not going to get much better than her. She's their best chance.

The escort calls for Volunteers. Enobaria steps forward, bares her gold-tipped teeth to the mid-morning sun and says, "You fuckers better not dare," in a sing-song that's fraught with warning.

Lyme stays silent. So do the rest. Enobaria nods, her face tight and expression unreadable, and Lyme wonders if it's starting now, the itch beneath her skin, the switch from _retired_ to _hunter_ - but never _prey_, not here, not in Two.

Enobaria stalks onto the stage, her head high and shoulders straight, and Lyme experiences another new emotion: the pricking of shame, because underneath it all she feels relief. It's not much, just a flicker in the deep recess of her heart, but it's there, and this is wrong, wrong, all of it wrong.

Claudius squeezes her hand again. Lyme knows his relief will be much stronger and without guilt, and she doesn't blame him for that. Mentors are complicated, the relationship twisted.

"And now for the boys," says the escort, _boys_, like they're thirteen to eighteen, like any other year, and this is absurd. Their youngest is twenty-one. Their oldest, seventy-seven. He pulls a slip of paper from the pile. "Nero."

Out of the last eighteen Reapings, Lyme has had a tribute in for ten of them. Not once has she reacted when their names were called. On the other hand, the name called was never her mentor, either, but even now Lyme just sucks in a sharp breath.

It's only noticeable because she's not the only one. Half the assembled Victors gasp, because it isn't just that Nero is Lyme's mentor, or the mentor of half the Victors of her generation. It's that he's Enobaria's, and that is the worst heresy that could ever befall a Victor in Two, the severing of the most sacred bond they know. It's sick; it's a perversion of everything they've fought to build, and what's worse, Enobaria's chances at a second return to sanity have just disappeared now that the only man who could reach her in her darkest days will be going in with her.

Lyme knows what that means. They all do. Their Victor has been determined right now, in this second, because Nero would rather stick a sword into his abdomen and pull out his own guts by hand than let his Victor die. Lyme's only choice now is whether to fight to be his mentor, to cross all the lines and possibly traumatize herself in the attempt, just so that she'll have more than five minutes in the Justice Building with him.

Nero lets out a long breath and straightens, taking a step forward, and the Victors ahead move aside, except for one. It's Brutus, his face a perfect mask of fury, and his hands are full-out fists now, his arms shaking from the effort of holding them still. Brutus is so traditional that Lyme and the others tease him; they like to pose him paradoxes, hypothetical situations where he has the choice to save a life if it means breaking a rule, or one with two diametrically opposite rules, and watch the Brutus-bot get thrown into errors. Brutus respects the rules more than anyone alive, more than the Capitol itself, because the Capitol can be capricious whereas Brutus thinks that's a swear word.

Brutus looks at Nero, and Lyme watches him make the decision, sees it in the slump of his shoulders and the jumping muscle in his jaw, and the only one that could be worse than her mentor is the closest thing she has to a friend. She and Brutus are colleagues and competition, and last year they went head-to-head before both their tributes died in the final days. They don't swap personal information or cry on each other's shoulders, but they came out around the same time and they do mean something to each other.

The thing with Nero is that authority in Two only flows one way, and she's only ever dealt with Nero in his protective role even as she outgrew the need for a mentor. Brutus, on the other hand, is Lyme's equal in the Two Victors' Village hierarchy, which means she's seen him with his head in his hands when Clove's brains stained Cato's pants, and he stood behind her for eight long hours while Cato was chewed alive, only leaving long enough to bring her coffee and grunt at her until she drank it. That night they went for drinks together, sat across from each other in a booth and stared at their glasses and said nothing.

Brutus glances at Lyme, and Lyme tightens her face, the corners of her eyes and her mouth, and she shakes her head, so lightly it's almost imperceptible. _Please,_ she tells him with her eyes. _Don't do this._

The corner of his mouth quirks in a wry smile, and he lifts one shoulder. _What are you gonna do?_

Lyme closes her eyes so she doesn't have to see it, but she hears it anyway. The strong voice, just like it was twenty-six years ago, calling out the two words that Lyme barely remembered him say as an impatient twelve-year-old but ring in her memory now: _I Volunteer._

_Of course he did_, Lyme used to huff when she found out that Brutus ended up staying in the main mentor's office overnight, doing work that could wait but that he wanted to finish in order to move on to even more work that could wait. When he worked from home and went days without eating just because it didn't cross his mind to leave his desk. When he wrangled a last-minute miracle for his tribute by convincing an impossible sponsor to fork over an insane amount of money on the sheer force of his personality and stubbornness. When he picked up two brawling new Victors by the back of their necks, one in each hand, and shook them like kittens while barking at them to settle the fuck down.

Now, Lyme watches Brutus climb the stage in short, powerful strides, sees him turn and glare out into the crowd with fierce determination and not a hint of anything that would betray his thoughts. Later the commentators will say it looks like he can't wait to get back in the Games, can't bear to let anyone else have all the fun, because that's his angle and he plays it to perfection. He looks at Enobaria, eyes dark and blazing, and they link hands and raise them together over their heads, teeth bared, roaring at the square. The returning applause is scattered, hesitant, as the people Brutus and Enobaria have already sacrificed themselves for once war with themselves on whether raucous approval or silence would show the most respect for their heroes.

Brutus glances at Lyme - and if he's the one who counts most as friend to her then it goes double the other way around - and raises his chin, and Lyme has worked with Brutus for eighteen years and can read him better than she can the mirror._ I got this. I chose it. It's okay._

He's lying. He chose this because he had to, because Brutus has a moral code the size of District Eleven and no one, not even the Capitol going back on seventy-five years of promises, can break that, and he's far from okay. But in the face of the whole world cracking to pieces beneath his feet, Brutus is doing the only thing he can: he's playing the Game.

"Of course he did," Lyme says aloud, without thinking, one last time.

"What?" Claudius asks.

Lyme shakes her head and puts herself back together, because she is a Victor and a mentor and that is what they do. "Everything," she says, and her voice thuds hollow in her empty chest.

* * *

According to the story, Roark's mom actually wanted to name him Victor. According to the story, Dad slapped her and told her that would as good as kill him, that a good Career name should never be that on the nose. There'd actually been a Career boy named Quell the year of the 25th and that didn't help him; he'd been knifed by his partner a minute after leaving the platforms. It's bad luck to tempt the Gamemakers like that.

Roark has no idea if this is true or if it's just the kind of thing that his parents find funny, but he does know they started trying to conceive exactly ten months before the 57th Hunger Games; they succeeded after six.

Either way, however it happened, Roark always knew he was destined for this, for the Third Quarter Quell. He stood up tall and proud on his first day of school when the teacher asked them all to introduce themselves, and he told the whole classroom that he was destined for greatness. That so far two Quells had gone past without a victory for District Two, but that would change when he turned eighteen. He would bring home the honour - restore the shame of letting a filthy Twelve and his forcefield tricks taint the 50th - and all of them, every kid in his class, should remember, because he'd invite them to the party.

He didn't actually realize the part about dying until he was ten, but by then it didn't matter. Roark was committed now.

The Centre doesn't allow for fear. It's not forbidden - that would be stupid, because they're children, not robots, and honestly someone who's not afraid at the thought of facing twenty-three other kids and a whole room full of clever, creative people and their death machines has something wrong with them - but it is managed, channelled, sent elsewhere, burned away until there's nothing left but certainty and confidence in their training. There's nothing wrong with fear; fear keeps you sharp, focused, means you're paying attention and have taken stock of the risks, but it must be managed. Fear is useful in a cage or on a leash, but don't let it run wild, and definitely don't look into its mouth.

Still, fear of the rigours of the Arena is one thing; fear of failure is another, and that's one that got its hooks into Roark deep and early. Fear of failing the Centre and his trainers, his parents, his district - the only one he's not afraid of failing is the Capitol, because there is no failing the Capitol, not if you go into the Games and follow the rules. They're taught early that even the most commonplace death is not ignominious to the Capitol, because it still serves as a reminder to the other districts. So, there's that. It doesn't comfort Roark much when he's alone in his room, but he takes what he can get.

He's chosen as Volunteer a month before the previous year's Victors, the pair from Twelve, leave for their Victory Tour. He's been on the shortlist since sixteen, but really, it was the girl from Twelve and her totally-not-rebellious suicide threat with the berries that cemented it. Roark is District Two personified in the same way Cato would have been if he'd lived; he's big, strong, tall and blond and handsome, and he'll be reassuring in a year full of whispers and mysterious shortages from the outer districts.

Roark has a few weeks to adjust to the absolute certainty that he very likely has six months to live when the trainers call them all into the main viewing room and tell them to sit in front of the giant television used for the Games and other important Capitol broadcasts. They're not allowed to go back to their rooms and change or anything, and Roark shows up drenched with sweat from weapons training. He flops on the sofa - the younger ones have to sit on the floor but the Seniors have privileges - and wonders what the Capitol's going to tell them now.

"They're going to read the rules for the Third Quarter Quell," says the trainer, and instantly everyone freezes. The group of thirteen-year-olds who'd been shoving each other knock it off immediately, the whispering group of girls in the corner falls silent, and Roark sits up straight. They're about to tell him how he's going to die.

Instead, they tell him he's not going to die at all. That he's going to have to sit at home on the couch and watch two of his heroes battle it out to the death instead.

The trainers have to restrain him. Roark leaps off the sofa, shouting obscenities at the television, and it takes two of them and a hypodermic needle in his neck to bring him down. The last thing Roark remembers is Grace, the girl who was meant to stand on the stage with him, sitting with her hands clapped over her mouth, her face deadly pale.

He crawls awake later, his head stuffed full of cotton, and sees Pryor, the head trainer, sitting in a chair by the bed. "Easy," says Pryor.

"Easy?" Roark grinds out, his voice rasping in his throat, and he'd never mouth off to Pryor like this except why not? What's the point now? What's the point of anything? "How can I take it easy? They took everything from me!"

Pryor's eyes tighten. "Careful," he says, his voice flat with warning.

But what is he going to do, _not_ send Roark off to die? "I'm not going to be careful," Roark snarls. "They did. Those fucking Twelves and their fucking berries and their fucking mockingjays and all this shit! This is their fault!"

The lines of Pryor's shoulders relax just a fraction. "I'm sure she didn't mean this to happen when she decided to play rebel, but yes, I suppose so."

"You'd fucking better suppose." Roark turns his head to the side, wanting to bury his face in the pillow, but even though there's nothing left for him, he can't. He's still a Career, even if he'll never be a tribute, let alone a Victor. "It's not fair! This was my year. I'm eighteen! It's not like I can just sit it out and go next year. Unless - unless they move the next Games up a month."

He looks at Pryor as a surge of hope flares in his chest, but the trainer just shakes his head. "I don't think they're going to do that. You just have to accept it. It's not as though you're going to get tossed out onto the street with nothing. You're the top of your class, have been since you were seven. You've passed every test brilliantly. Whatever you want to do with your life, I guarantee that if you want to do it in Two, you'll be able to."

Roark closes his eyes. "I want to give my life to the Capitol. I want to bring pride to my district."

"Well, you can't, not as a tribute," Pryor says sharply, and that's authority there, Roark's warning to step back and yield, even though he's not in line anymore and technically he doesn't have to obey anymore. "I'm telling you, there are other ways to serve."

"Not good enough," Roark says dully. He wonders what his parents are thinking. The rumour goes they spent a small fortune on fertility treatments to make sure he came out healthy and free of undesirable attributes. They're probably on the phone with a team of lawyers now, trying to figure out whether this is legal.

They let him stay in the Centre, even though there's no point now that he's been struck from the roster. They give Grace the option, too, but she decides to leave and take a room in the ex-Career dorms. Nobody's surprised, even less so when her girlfriend gets herself cut two weeks later so they can be together. Roark doesn't go. He stays in his room, goes to training every day, and they don't test him, don't send him for the usual checks, don't make him do the endurance tests or the survival tests or sleep deprivation tests, just let him work through his anger in the weapons room.

Fucking District Twelve. No, not just them - fucking outer districts, period. Fuck them and their self-pity. Fuck them for thinking their personal grievances are more important than the good of the entire country - does it make them feel better in District Eight to shut down their factories and know that all over Panem kids will be going without shoes and coats this winter? Do the people of District Eleven pat themselves on the back now that families in urban districts who can't just walk outside and pluck fruit off the trees will have nothing to eat but prepackaged shit full of preservatives?

Fuck them for mandating a punishment big enough that it hits the whole country at once. Fuck them for ruining Roark's life and the lives of his parents, who gave him everything so that he could give it all back to the nation that fed and clothed and protected them for three quarters of a century.

Fuck them for killing his heroes. Roark has had the Victor roster memorized since he was five years old. It was his party trick as a kid, when his parents had their ex-Career friends over; he could name any Two Victor, their weapon or specialization, notable kills, their Talent, and anything salient about them since. He's fantasized about moving into the Victor's Village and becoming one of them - having dinner at their houses, friendly bouts of sparring, maybe getting a nickname - since he was nine.

And now he has to watch them die, all because the whiny fuckers in the outlying districts don't know how to take their own damn medicine.

"Could I Volunteer?" Roark asks one afternoon after bursting into Pryor's office. In his defence, he did wait a whole ten minutes. "I mean, instead of one of the Victors. It just says that the names in the Reaping Ball will be taken from the living Victors, right? It didn't say anything about Volunteers."

Pryor hesitates, and for a glorious second Roark thinks he has him, but then he shakes his head. "I'm sorry, but no. Only those eligible may Volunteer, regardless of the criteria. This year, no one outside those in the pool will be allowed to Volunteer."

Roark doesn't slam his fist through the wall, but it's a very, very close call. "All right," he says instead, and digs his nails into his palm.

"You could try looking at it as a gift," Pryor says, but he doesn't mean it, and he says nothing when Roark fixes him with a disgusted glare. It's not a gift. It's a disgrace, and everyone knows it.

The months pass, and there's no 'gotcha!' from the Capitol, no special announcement that says they were kidding, that everyone straightened up after their warning and things will proceed as planned. And so on Reaping Day Roark stands on the sidelines, staring at the gold bead that used to mean something but now may as well get melted down to use as pocket change, and watches as Brutus, the greatest Victor of his generation and the beating heart of District Two, Volunteers instead.

Of course he did. Roark stands rigid, seething with jealousy and admiration, and Roark wants to ask Brutus what's going through his mind, how long he's wanted this and what this means to him, but he can't. Trainees aren't allowed in the Justice Building and they enforce that rule this year, even though Roark is no longer a trainee and Brutus hasn't been one since before the last Quarter Quell.

They let him stay in the Centre to watch the Games dissection by the trainers. Pryor almost says no - he tells Roark he needs to deal with this and not wallow - but Roark convinces him that there's no way for him to deal if he can't watch it, and he wants to see it with his classmates and trainers one more time before he goes. Finally Pryor nods and signs a one-month extension on Roark's time in Residential.

It means that Roark gets front-row seats for the District Twelve and friends show, and the only good thing is that at least he's not the only one disgusted. The other kids in the Centre sit with frowns on their faces, and even the trainers stand with their arms crossed and mouths pressed in a thin line when it's Katniss Everdeen, the Two-killer, and her lovestruck fiancé who eat up all the commentator time during the days when the tributes are training. Everyone keeps talking about the tragedy of their being sent back into the Arena before they're even legally married, and scarcely a word about the deserving mentors who've put in decades of their lives to the Games only for that to be taken away.

The interviews are an interesting train wreck. The Ones start it off by making pleas to the Capitol - Cashmere even cries, though of course that's not real - and Roark and the other kids sit in awkward silence. Roark can't stop looking at the trainers, whose body language has stiffened. It's something about what they're saying, something specific about Gloss' phrasing when he thanks the Capitol for the kindness shown to him and his sister. The trainers suck in their breaths in a collective hiss, and the camera on stage shows Brutus in the wings, looking mutinous, his jaw attempting to grind his teeth into meal. Roark doesn't know what that means, and now, denied entry into the Victor's Circle forever, he never will.

Brutus' interview, on the other hand, is everything it should be. It's solid, reassuring, and Roark feels the glow of comfort until he realizes that something isn't quite right. Brutus' interview itself is the proper Two blend of charismatic without crossing the line into smarmy, and he answers everything perfectly, but his expression is set in stone. Roark has watched Brutus' interview from his original Games - they all have, Brutus' Games are legendary - and even then, while he played the strong, mostly-silent type, he showed a dark, wicked streak of black humour that kept the audience gasping in shock before the laughter hit.

There's none of that now. It takes Roark a while to get it, but then when they cut back to those waiting in line, the other Victors are giving him sour, discomfited looks, and then he understands. This is Brutus' warning to the others, his statement that what has happened to him is not okay. He's done nothing but what the Capitol wants for over two decades, pulled out more tributes alive than almost any other Victor in history, and yet he's back here. Back here, going to die, and he's still playing the Game, and the outer districts should feel the guilt all the way down to their toes for forcing the Capitol to punish its most loyal servant just because it can't play favourites. Because the President can't just punish the ones who misbehaved, District Two is going to lose its hero. And it's all their fault.

"So how does it feel, being back in the Games and knowing you're going to face your friends tomorrow?" Caesar asks, and Roark goggles because what kind of question is that?

Brutus takes a second to think about that. "Well," he says finally, and he leans back in his chair. "I guess we'll all see who our real friends are pretty soon."

Roark hopes the other Victors choke on the strength of their own hypocrisy.

By the end of Brutus' interview, Roark's eyes burn, and several of the younger kids are fully in tears. One of the trainers - another Victor, not called in the Reaping - has to leave, and the others say nothing when she swipes a hand across her eyes on the way out. Brutus is beautiful, and the actions of the outer districts are going to kill him. Hatred for the traitors kindles the fire in Roark's chest.

The rest of the districts are a scandal. It's messy and emotional, and they beg and cajole and plead - the ones who aren't too drunk to talk, anyway - until the audience is in a flood of tears, reacting to even the slightest show of emotion with a waterfall of its own. Victor after Victor from the middle and outer districts questions the wisdom of the Capitol, the power of President Snow.

By the time the male Victor from Eleven posits that the President could change the Games if he wanted to, he just doesn't care, Roark can't take it anymore. A rage has been boiling inside him since he first heard the news, and now it's a tornado of fury that he thinks just might consume him from the inside. "It's bullshit!" he bursts out, and the trainers pause the feed but don't quiet him, and that means he's right. "It's all bullshit. The Capitol? They're blaming the _Capitol_? They're the ones who rebelled. They're the ones who broke the rules and thought they could get away with it. They're all going to die but it's their own damn faults, and they're dragging in good people because of it. None of them would be there if they'd just done what the rest of us do!"

The room ripples as the kids agree with him, and again, Roark notices that while they don't speak up in support, the trainers don't correct him, either. They just press play, in time for the lovers to make the biggest, most treasonous display in the history of the Games followed by a bogus pregnancy announcement and accompanying sob story to wrench away the last of the attention from anyone who matters.

They have to sedate Roark after that. He's glad for it, because they give him something that keeps away the dreams. He doesn't wake up until morning, when they're brought in for an early breakfast and trotted back into the main room to watch the actual Games start.

The streak of non-Career luck continues when it's the girl from Twelve who makes it to the Cornucopia first.

"Where did a Twelve learn to swim anyway?" bursts out Briar, as the girl from the coal-mining district cuts her way through the water. Brutus and Enobaria learned the same way all of the Two trainees did - getting tossed into a lake in the middle of winter - and they're not going to drown, but they won't win any speed records, either.

Roark snorts. "Maybe she has a big bathtub," he mutters. He's less than impressed when thirty seconds later, Twelve makes the same joke to Four. It's funny when he said it. Coming from her it's just a lie.

That Twelve can swim just makes the whole thing even more insulting, because it's clear the Arena was meant to give the advantage to the Careers - especially Four, but whatever, Twos can swim better than any of the outlying districts so it still counts - but she managed to cheat her way out of a disadvantage. Again.

"Do you notice anything different about Twelve this year?" the trainer asks.

Roark narrows his eyes. If he were in the Arena right now, he wouldn't be expected to over-think - far from it, over-thinking gets you killed - but here he has the opportunity. He watches Twelve move through the weapons, taking her pick and choosing a golden bow and two quivers of arrows, sees her exchange words with Four and the formation of the first alliance, and it finally hits him when she fires at three out of the four Careers without blinking. This is not the girl who stumbled her way out of being killed in the bloodbath last year. She's confident, prepared.

"She's acting like a Career," Roark says.

The trainer nods. "For better or for worse, having those months means the other Victors had the chance to train themselves up. Looks like Twelve took it."

Not so much her husband-to-be, who needs Four to rescue him, and Roark snorts. Nobody whose angle was the moon-eyed lover should ever have been allowed to win. Last year was a disgrace. His throat tightens and his fists ache for the chance to smash both Twelves' skulls in for tainting what should have been the greatest Games Panem has ever seen with their traitor stench.

She obviously doesn't know a damn about being a Career even if she's playing at being one, though, because she leaves the Cornucopia with her fiancee and both the Fours instead of taking anyone of real use. Roark hopes they'll get picked off by the Gamemakers soon; with an Arena that small and that distinctively set up, there's bound to be a trick in there somewhere.

With Twelve and her friends gone and the others still struggling to reach the Cornucopia, the Career alliance has some time to relax. Brutus wipes his forehead with his sleeve, drawing away saltwater and sweat. "Nothin' but weapons," he says, kicking at the butt of an axe and taking a spear for himself. "They don't plan on this one to last too long." He picks up a set of gilt-handled daggers, shrugs, and tosses them at Gloss.

"Makes sense to me." Enobaria shrugs and checks the balance on a throwing knife. "I don't even think we could make picking off a bunch of drunks and addicts exciting for three weeks."

Brutus snorts. "I think you underestimate yourself, little girl," he says, but then his jaw tightens and he goes back to the weapons pile.

"We should just throw whatever we don't use into the water," says Gloss, frowning. He picks up the axe that Brutus nudged earlier and gestures to the water. "We all know who this is for. We know what's intended for everyone. We should take ours and toss the rest."

Brutus shakes his head. "That's not how it's done," he says. "You know who blows up the Cornucopia, or sinks it, or whatever? Twelves. Not Careers. We take what we need and we leave the rest. The water ain't deep enough to make it a good hiding place this close to the beach anyway."

The siblings share a look, an eye roll and small grin, that means they think Brutus is old-fashioned, but that just means they don't get it. He's not old-fashioned, he's just traditional and honourable and doesn't need to hide weapons from everyone else to win. Roark lets out a breath. All right, so his own life is basically ruined, and he's pretty much resigned himself to drinking to death in a dark bar somewhere by the time he's twenty-four, but at least they couldn't have found a better person to represent District Two in this mess.

The battle at the Cornucopia is short and brutal, but the body count is the lowest in at least the last five years. Besides the man killed by Four before the others arrived, only five tributes lie dead in the sand at the mouth of the horn by the time the fighting winds down. Most of the ones who escaped didn't even bother to swim toward the Cornucopia at all, just turned around and swam toward the jungle on the opposite side of the platforms. That only works so well, though, since the woman from Eleven gets snapped up by some kind of shark-muttation. The hovercraft doesn't even bother picking up the pieces, and the water churns and the blood foams as the mutt works to clean up the last of the leftovers.

"Harsh," Gloss remarks idly, when Brutus throws a spear straight into the heart of the woman from Eight. "Doesn't she have kids?"

Brutus shoots him a dark look. "Yeah. Now it's done."

The trainer pauses the feed. "See that?" she says, tapping the screen right between Brutus' furrowed brows. "This is how a Two shows compassion. He didn't try to save her, like Twelve did the old woman from Four, because he's realistic and he knows how to play the Game. But he gave her a good death, a quick one, and now her children won't have to watch for the next week while she starves to death or gets torn to pieces by mutts. Watch and learn, kids. Brutus is the best for a reason."

Roark feels the burn of shame in his chest. He wouldn't have thought of that; assuming he didn't just kill her outright, if he'd felt any sympathy at all, he might have let her go, hoping someone else would kill her, but the trainer is absolutely right. Brutus knows what he's doing, and Roark isn't even worthy to clean his boots.

On the screen, Brutus digs his feet into the sand as the last of the stragglers make it to the beach. Most of the others landed on the far side and aren't going to risk the Cornucopia, but two of them - the men from Eleven and Eight - stand together, their posture a challenge. "Hate to disappoint, but there's no food," Brutus says, twirling his spear in his hand. "Just weapons. Don't think you'll be needing those, so may as well turn around and go."

"What is wrong with you?" Gloss hisses in his ear, and the cameras focus in on Brutus' expression, solemn and knowing.

"You want it to end right now?" Brutus says in a low voice. "The bloodbath has to stop soon. They rush us now, we kill 'em all and it's over in a day. That ain't any way to play. The Gamemakers won't be happy."

The one-handed man from Eleven crosses his broad arms across his chest. "I think you got something for me in there," he says, brandishing his empty stump. "Toss that to me and I'll be on my way."

Brutus holds out one hand. Gloss curses, digs around in the pile until he finds a wrist cuff with a hook attachment. Brutus throws it at Eleven's feet. "Much obliged," he says dryly, and heads back toward the jungle.

The elderly man from Eight drags himself up, totters on his feet, then picks up a piece of driftwood and makes a run for the Cornucopia. Brutus clicks his tongue against his teeth and hurls his spear through the man's chest; Enobaria stalks forward and slits his throat to make sure he's gone. They don't say anything, and they don't need to; Roark recognizes a suicide run when he sees one, and the Careers will, too.

"Well, that was boring as fuck," Enobaria says, once it's clear no one else is going to rush the pile of weapons. "Didn't even get to take out anybody good."

"If you want to wrestle for the Girl on Fire, I'm up for it," Cashmere drawls, and Enobaria bares her teeth in a grin.

Brutus doesn't say anything, but he shades his eyes and stares out over the water at the strip of sand where the Twelve-Four alliance took off. The Careers finish picking out their weapons, then head back down the sandbar toward the jungle.

It's only later, when the full potential horror of the Arena reveals itself in the jungle, that Roark feels the first stirring of relief that it isn't him in there. It's awful, and Roark will deny it until he dies, but he sees the male from District Seven - a young man, comparatively, and healthy - get half-drowned by a torrent of blood until, choking, he runs head first into the force field keeping him trapped inside the affected wedge, and Roark's chest feels as though it collapsed. Nothing could have saved him. If it were the Centre's best Career in there, it wouldn't have mattered. No way to escape the air full of blood until there's nothing to breathe, nowhere to go. Even Brutus would have died, and it wouldn't have made a difference how big or strong or savvy he is.

"Who's figured out the trick with the Arena?" the trainers ask them, but Roark doesn't know. None of them do. They're too blinded by the terrible genius of it, and Roark knows every one of them is wondering what their Arena will hold for them, if it's ever their turn. The trainer nods. "Watch."

The Careers figure it out when the Twelve-Four alliance is busy being dissolved to death by acid fog. Roark shudders - he remembers the nerve agent test when he was sixteen, and he has more nightmares about that than anything else - and to give himself time to breathe he focuses on the Two-only feed, where Brutus tells Cashmere to climb a tall tree in the back of their section and see if they can figure out what the hell is going on.

"It's like a clock," Cashmere says when she climbs back down. Her silken hair sticks to her neck with sweat. "I'm sure of it. The whole thing's divided up into triangles. Only one section of the Arena gets hit by traps at a time."

"Are you sure?" her brother asks.

"Yes, I'm sure," she snaps. "There's fog filling up the whole jungle in one section of the island, and it stops in straight lines at the edges. I'm guessing there are forcefields to keep you inside. Another section looks like someone gave it a blood bath, literally. The trees are dripping with it, and that doesn't show up anywhere else."

Brutus frowns. "Well, at least we know how they plan to keep it interesting," he says. He turns his face up to the camera and folds his arms. "What's a guy gotta do to get some paper and pens around here?"

It doesn't take long for the sponsors to respond, and so while the Twelve-Fours lie on the beach with absolutely no clue what's going on, the Careers start mapping out the island and marking in the sections they know. Roark lets out a breath. They can do this.

Later that day, during a skirmish on the beach, Twelve fires an arrow straight into Gloss' temple, and Seven hurls her axe straight into Cashmere's breastbone. They die in the sand without fanfare, and in a normal year Roark wouldn't mourn the Ones - inferior versions of Two, really - but this year it sticks in his throat. Cashmere and Gloss were Victors already, and Ones or not, they deserved something better than this. At least they went down fighting and not taken out by the Arena and the Gamemakers' creations, which Roark supposes is the best they could hope for, but it irks him that the Gamemakers forced the battle to stop before Brutus and Enobaria could avenge them. He knows it's because they need to draw it out, but still.

"It's coming," Enobaria says in the evening, after the anthem and parade of the fallen. Eight deaths, and only one of them caused by a Career. Another first.

She and Brutus sit in the wedge where the giant muttation ripped apart one of the tributes before dinner, poking at their fire and slapping at the insects that buzz around their faces. "I don't know if it's going down tomorrow or what, but it's soon. That shit with the wire, that meant something. Twelve went all the way out and fought the hovercraft for it, I saw it on my way out. I should have taken the damn thing when I ran."

"Yeah, probably." Brutus rubs at a smear of dried blood above his eyebrow with the back of his hand. It's only been two days, but with the Arena and the traitors and everything else, Roark doesn't blame him for looking so exhausted. "But 'shoulda' never did much but cause headaches."

"We should find and kill them tonight," Enobaria says, her jaw tight. "You think they're not thinking about a way to off us right now? It's us and them, and don't tell me you haven't noticed they've all allied against us. We can't risk it."

Roark hisses. It's a thought that's been niggling at him for a while, but he didn't manage to put it together in his brain. Now that Enobaria's said it out loud, he realizes she's right; with the exception of the man from Eleven, who's been moving from safe zone to safe zone on his own - probably hoping that if the others don't kill themselves off, the Arena will do it for him - all the other tributes have banded together. No one has struck a move, despite plenty of opportunity, countless times when two were alone and one's attention distracted.

It's practically an Arena-wide alliance, excepting the Twos. Roark's chest squeezes. He can't remember the last time a non-Career alliance was bigger than a pair, let alone five people - six, including the woman that Gloss killed before he died. Seven if they count the old woman from Four; eight if it wasn't an accident that the morphling from Six threw herself at the monkey-muttations that were going for the boy from Twelve. Who knows who else might have been part of it, but just happened to die before they were able to meet up.

The more Roark thinks about it, the stronger the sense of foreboding that curls in his chest. He swallows, but his throat is dry and his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth. Something is happening. He just doesn't know what.

"Yeah, well, we're not gonna find them," Brutus says, his voice dull with finality. He sits with his hands dangling between his bent knees. "Not when we've only got an hour to move through each sector. These aren't greenhorns from Ten, they're Victors, and all the crazies and the addicts are dead. We still don't know what half the traps are. We'd probably get ourselves killed first."

Enobaria growls, and she pulls a knife out of nowhere and sends it into the nearest tree trunk, glaring at the spurt of water that trickles out beneath the blade. "So we take the beach. It's shorter anyway, and the only trap that goes past the trees is the wave at ten."

Brutus shakes his head. "It's not worth the risk."

"Since when were you cautious?" Enobaria demands, and Roark reads the frustration in the sharp lines of her shoulders, the way her fingers twitch as though she wants to stick a knife in deep and see the blood. Roark knows that feeling well, and an answering urge stirs itself inside him. He shoves it back.

"Since the rules went out the damn window," Brutus snaps, losing his temper with her for the first time. His hands curl into fists, and he stares her down, his face savage in the firelight. Roark's heart pounds; if their alliance breaks now, he can't imagine they'll be safe. Not with everyone else joined against them. "I'm playing it safe. Running around like some idiot twelve-year-old too ain't gonna help us."

Enobaria narrows her eyes at him, but finally she throws up her hands, turns her snarl into something more like a smirk. The danger passes. "Fine. We do it your way. But if I end up dead tomorrow, you'd better believe I'm haunting your ass in the afterlife."

Brutus snorts, the first thing that's sounded anywhere close to humour from him this year at all. "You really think there is one?"

She holds a knife between two fingers, tilting it so the light from the campfire dances on the blade. "Nah. I hope not. After all the shit we've been through, I think I'd just like to sleep. If I die and wake up somewhere else, I'm going to be pissed as fuck."

"Yeah," Brutus says, and there's a shadow behind his eyes that Roark can't place, but he knows he doesn't like it.

Enobaria tosses a handful of twigs into the fire. "You didn't have to Volunteer for Nero, you know. It would've been good and symbolic. You know, a Victor and her mentor, can't get a better show than that."

Brutus gives her a look. "Don't be stupid," he says, and Roark thinks to the trainer earlier, during the bloodbath: _This is how a Two shows compassion_. "It ain't right."

"Still. You and me, we don't have any real history. It's not exactly compelling viewing." Enobaria talks idly, like she's not that invested in what she's saying but wants to fill the silence.

"If you're suggesting we fuck, I ain't interested."

"Don't flatter yourself, pops." Enobaria kicks a flaming leaf from the edge of the campfire so it sizzles against Brutus' ankle, and he grunts and brushes it free. She leans back, lacing her fingers together and bracing herself with her hands clasped over her knee, looking back up at the sky. "You know we're not meant to win."

Brutus doesn't respond, and Enobaria continues, her voice laced with poison. "I mean, look at this Arena, it's like a fucking kindergarten project. Divide the Arena up into sections and only activate one at a time, fine, but in order? The same way every time, two days running? Unless they throw the routine all to hell tomorrow, this is like baby food. It's meant to keep Katniss alive, otherwise they wouldn't bother spoon-feeding it." When Brutus still says nothing, Enobaria growls. "Well? You gonna answer me or what?"

"What do you want me to say?" Brutus asks, not looking at her, and he's weary, so, so weary. None of this makes sense to Roark. Why would anyone want to keep the traitor-districts alive? "Fine, yeah, you're right, this Arena ain't for us. Does that make it better?"

Enobaria bends forward again and rests her forehead against her thigh. "This blows."

Brutus huffs a dead laugh. "Yeah."

Roark's insides twist. Somewhere else in the room, a couple of the younger kids are sniffling. Nobody gets told to suck it up or threatened with wall sits or suicides or anything. The trainer shakes her head and runs a hand through her hair. "All right, kids, tell me what they're doing."

None of them can say. All Roark can think is how all of this is wrong, he doesn't know where he is or what's up or down or who he should be trusting, and intrigue is part of the Games every year but not like this. The Cornucopia is at the middle and the forcefield at the edge, that's always true and everything else falls into place, but this year it feels like that's the only truth still extant here.

"They're appealing," says the trainer in a flat voice, and Roark flinches because Twos don't appeal, that's not their thing. A desperate Two is a dead Two. Then again, if Brutus and Enobaria think the Arena is meant to kill them - even though that doesn't make any sense - then they're not risking anything. "This is not a situation I would ever, ever recommend any of you, do you hear me? You're young and you don't have the experience."

Roark thinks of the disclaimer that those imitation-Career television sports shows always say after the host does a triple knife flip one-handed: _Don't try this at home, kids_! Reflexive, horrible, inappropriate laughter bubbles in his throat, but he swallows it.

"They're going for humanity." The trainer doesn't ask them to explain, just talks, her fingers held tight together with her hands behind her back. "It's a last-ditch strategy for Twos, but this year, with so much sentiment floating around, it's their shot. The other tributes are playing this up as the scrappy band of underdogs against the unfeeling monsters, and they don't have time to wait for this to fall apart. Their only option is to try to remind everyone that they're people too. Why could this work for them and not you?"

Roark looks around the room at the kids who grew up with these two as heroes - none of the kids in Residential were alive when either of them were crowned - and at the trainers who might have fought alongside them in the Centre. Kids are crying or sitting in shocked silence, clinging to each other for reassurance and stability. The trainers are a mostly monolithic wall of disapproval and taut shoulders.

"Because they aren't just tributes," Roark says, his throat tight. "They're already Victors. We haven't earned that right yet."

The trainer nods. "That's right," she says, and there's anger in her voice that Roark hasn't heard since last year when Cato's death got the TV shut off and all the kids sent to Medical for nightmare medication. Roark palmed his. He still remembers the dreams of wet, dripping walls.

On screen, Enobaria sits up, and any trace of emotion has been purged from her expression, leaving nothing but savage professionalism. "The alliance, it can't last. That's why they're rushing this. Katniss and Little Miss Axe-Happy, give them any excuse and they'll be at each other's throats, I don't care what the others have been doing to save her and her baby or her fiancee. Katniss doesn't trust them, and either it's hormones or true paranoia but it wouldn't take much."

Brutus nods, slowly. "I say we wait and figure out what they're planning. Depending on what it is, we find a way to force the alliance to crack."

Enobaria snorts. "I'd still rather just knife them all right now and be done with it, but -" she holds up a hand to forestall any remonstrations from Brutus. "I know, I know, no way to find them, I get it, I'll behave."

"No point in starting now," Brutus says, with a flicker of humour, then he sighs and pulls his spear across his lap. "I'll take first watch, you get some sleep. Your being twitchy is making me twitchy."

"I'm crying," Enobaria shoots back, but having a plan, even one that's contingent on waiting, seems to relax them, and she sprawls out with her head pillowed on her jacket. Like any good Career, she's out in seconds, and Roark doesn't miss that she leaves herself entirely open to attack if Brutus decided he could do better on his own. He wouldn't, because that makes no sense, but even then Roark thinks of the Twelves refusing to sleep at the same time while surrounded by their supposed allies.

Brutus and Enobaria are right. Whatever the non-Careers think is happening, it's not going to last. If they can just stay alive - they can't be right about the Arena being a death trap for them, that makes no sense and is probably just the Arena in their head - then they can still do this. One of them can still come home. Roark doesn't chase the details of that thought too far.

"All right, kids," says the trainer, when the Arena footage fades and cuts back to Caesar Flickerman and today's special guest for feature commentary. "Time to sleep. We'll haul you out of bed if anything happens."

Roark lies awake thinking about Brutus and wondering what's going through his mind, how much of what he said on television was real and what it means if a man like him can feel fear and betrayal so deep it makes him doubt himself. After an hour he sighs, gets up, and pads down to Medical for a sedative. The nurse gives it to him, but she makes him stay until he swallows it right in front of her. Roark doesn't get why for a second, and then it hits him that she must be worried he'll take it with him and start hoarding to use against himself later. He shivers.

The next day, Roark and the others watch as Brutus and Enobaria, concealed in the tree line just behind the beach, spy on the alliance's plans. Roark is increasingly convinced that the man from Three is insane, with his cockamamie plans to electrify the salt water and somehow turn the beach into a gigantic conduit. Roark didn't do too well in school early on and he only went until his thirteenth birthday anyway, but even he thinks that seems suspect, especially when Three specifies that it requires the Twos to be awake and near the beach at midnight, which they've never done.

Not to mention that the man explains how the Twos are very likely watching them right now, then goes through the entire plan in detail anyway.

It doesn't surprise Roark at all when the trainers pause the feed. "All right, I'm sure you've noticed that. What's happening?"

They talk through it and argue with each other - he can't be senile, he's obviously intelligent and astute, and he played the addle-brained not-all-there card the first time and won because of it - and arrive at the conclusion that he's lying. Not just to fool the Careers he knows are listening, but his friends, too. Whatever the plan involves, it's probably not trying to use the lightning against the lake.

"I don't think he trusts them," says Brooke, a girl in Roark's year. She's one of the prettiest, and she was in the top five before Grace snagged the part. He was never allowed to talk to her in case they were paired together, and only now does it hit Roark that he could, if he wanted, that thanks to Brutus he doesn't have to worry about that anymore. "His friends, I mean. They're not stupid, but they're not smart. He thinks they're going to mess it up and he's going to do all the hard work himself."

It's not a bad strategy when only one of them is going to win anyway, despite the massive alliance. Roark wonders if that's Three's plan all along; keep everyone together so he can kill them all in one stroke. It worked for him before, and no one seems to have picked up on it. Maybe they haven't watched his Games. This, Roark thinks, is why it's good to be a Career.

Sure enough, Brutus takes a few steps back into the jungle, far enough that their voices won't carry over the humming of insects, and shakes his head. "Obviously bullshit."

"Yeah." Enobaria frowns. "So what the hell's he actually doing?"

Brutus just shrugs, a movement that reminds Roark of a rockslide. "Doubt we're gonna outthink him on this one. Better just to keep an eye on 'em, see if we get any clues."

The rest of the day passes slowly, and Roark and the others are kicked out of the TV room and sent to train. At dinner he hears that the only thing the allies did was sit on the beach having a seafood feast, complete with sponsor-provided bread and spicy dip. Meanwhile Brutus and Enobaria spent their afternoon patching each other up after an unscheduled wave of fire chased them into the eleven-to-twelve wedge right before it went active with thousands of carnivorous insects.

When the anthem plays, no faces float in the sky. On screen, Brutus lets out a low hiss. "That ain't good," he says.

"Probably for the best they're putting their little plan together tonight, then," Enobaria says, poking at a swollen bite at her arm and grimacing before reaching for the container of salve. "If we can take out a couple of them, that'll keep things interesting and maybe buy us a little more time before people get any more bored."

She says this with a flick of her eyes toward one of the cameras, and Roark winces. He and the other trainees know that Brutus and Enobaria paid the price for the alliance's inactivity with their forced jaunt through the insect trap, and if they know it, so does she.

Once again, the outer districts managed to punish Two, and they don't care. Maybe the Twelves are too young and inexperienced to know any better, but the other mentors aren't. They'll know that the audiences wouldn't be interested in twelve hours of sitting on the beach, kissing and talking and eating food, that someone else will have had to be interesting in their stead, but they obviously don't care.

There's playing the Game, and then there's just being deliberate assholes about it. It's amazing to Roark that people can take something that already involves killing twenty-three other people and make it even more disturbing, but that's the traitors for you.

Enobaria finishes reapplying the medicine and picks up her weapons. "Should get a couple hours each while we can. Who knows what shit's going to go down. You go first, if that won't offend your chivalric caveman brain."

Brutus glares at her, but Enobaria just grins at him, the moonlight glittering off her teeth, and he rolls his eyes and stretches out. Once he's asleep, Enobaria clicks her tongue and leans back against a tree trunk and rolls a small knife over the backs of her fingers. "You're too good for this shit," she says to Brutus' unconscious form. "You shouldn't be here at all, you noble fucker. Makes the rest of us look bad."

Roark's throat tightens, and he has to look away from the screen.

The trainers send them all out for the next few hours and call them back at ten. Brutus and Enobaria are awake, moving across the jungle, gradually down toward the beach - and if Roark wasn't sure that Three's trap was a lie, that convinces him, because otherwise they would've been hightailing it in the opposite direction.

Roark only half pays attention to all the preparations - it's dark and the cameras can't make out a lot of detail, but Three wraps the coil around a tree and Twelve and Seven start spooling the excess down to the beach while the others wait - until Three cuts the wire about ten feet from the tree, and that's when everything goes all to hell.

The wire goes slack - Twelve and Seven look at each other - and it's obviously some kind of signal because Seven brains Twelve upside the head with the metal canister she's holding and knocks her flat into the bushes. Seven takes a knife and digs it hard into Twelve's arm, and half the trainees cry out reflexively because they know what an injury like that will do. Stuck in the Arena for Snow knows how long after this, Twelve will be lucky if she can use her arm ever again.

Except then, while Twelve swoons from the pain and blood loss, Seven digs something out of the wound and throws it aside. The moonlight catches her own arm as she raises it to toss whatever it is, and there's a bloody bandage on her own forearm. Roark sucks in a breath.

The trackers. She's cutting out the trackers. Probably the other outliers have done the same. Whatever this is, it's way, way bigger than just electrifying the beach, and Twelve has no idea.

Brutus and Enobaria crash through the trees soon after, making more noise than an outlier with a death wish, and Brutus looks at the bushes where Twelve is lying, bleeding out and too dazed too move. Now, Roark thinks, the anticipation thrilling in his veins. Now is the time, before whatever it is goes down, while people are still distracted - Four has left his post and is careening down the hill, shouting like a maniac; the Twelve boy darts off in another direction down toward the beach in a panic. Brutus will never have a better chance.

Brutus swallows, then every line of his body tightens with determination. "She's as good as dead," he says deliberately, in a voice loud enough that anyone even remotely close will hear him, including Twelve. "Let's go, Enobaria!"

Enobaria gives him a weird look - no need to use her name when she's the only one there - but she doesn't argue, just follows him through the jungle. "You'd better be right," she grits out, and Roark has no idea what she means by that. They must have talked somewhere the cameras couldn't catch.

"No fucking kidding," Brutus says in a grim undertone.

Up at the top, Three has some kind of seizure - it's not unexpected in the end, he's old and batty and this is a lot of stress even for someone young and trained - and collapses next to the tree, his limbs jerking and twitching. Roark grimaces. The cameras leave him there, and Roark bets it won't be long until they hear a cannon.

The Mockingjay drags herself to her feet, relief widening her eyes, and she has no idea what happened. No idea that Brutus let her go on purpose, and Roark might not know why but that fact itself is clear, clearer than the moonlight on the sand as Brutus and Enobaria make it down to the edge of the jungle.

Seven gets her feet tangled in a web of vines and crashes to the ground, spitting and cursing. Baker boy tears through the jungle toward the beach, looking for his fiancee, ignoring the thorns that rip his clothes and dig into his skin. Four lopes through the underbrush like an oiled gazelle. Roark thinks he might throw up from the tension and regrets eating anything at supper, as now everything rolls around in his stomach and presses up into his throat.

Everything collides on the beach. Brutus and Enobaria whirl around in time to see the man from Eleven - and where the hell has _he_ been for the last three days, Roark wants to know - burst out of the jungle, holding a curved sword the length of his arm. A few seconds later it's Four from the other side. The boy from Twelve huddles at the edge of the trees, watching and shaking, too paralyzed with fear and shock to move. His mouth moves in the darkness but the cameras can't pick up what he's trying to say.

Brutus and Enobaria hesitate, then both spring into action, weapons ready. "I've got Chaff," says Brutus, hefting his spear, and he has a short sword at his waist in case that misses. "You take Odair."

Enobaria nods, and she sprints up the beach toward Four, who makes an impressive turnaround and disappears back into the jungle. "You get your pretty ass back here!" Enobaria yells after him, and then she, too, is gone.

"You're done," says Eleven to Brutus, the moonlight glinting off the blade of his scimitar. "It's gone too far for you to fuck it up now."

Roark waits for Brutus to throw the spear straight through Eleven's chest - no better way to eliminate stalling in the form of dramatic monologues - but he doesn't. "Now's the time to tell me what the hell is going on," he snarls.

"Really? You think I'm gonna do that? After what your boy did to Thresh last year?" Eleven spits onto the sand. "He carved him up like a damn holiday bird."

"I think he got repaid pretty good," Brutus says, his voice on edge, and Roark pushes back the image of Cato in the Cornucopia being torn to pieces. "And he wasn't my boy, he was Lyme's. Clove was mine." Clove, her head smashed in by a rock held in Thresh's fist.

"Like I care which one. You're all the same." Eleven's face is ugly in the darkness, twisted and borderline insane. Roark wonders what it was that happened to him in the Arena that didn't make good enough for television but still left him this unhinged. Maybe it's just the pressure of being back at all. "Your time's up, that's all I care."

"Thirty years," Brutus says, moving slowly, and they circle each other, stepping sideways, foot over foot, stalking like lions. "Almost thirty years we've worked together, and that's the shit you pull."

"Thirty years of watching your kids murder mine," Eleven snaps. "Thirty years of telling my kids to run for the Cornucopia just so at least it's quick, so they don't get tortured to death a week in when yours get bored."

"It's the Hunger Games, not chess," Brutus snarls. "What happens in the Arena stays in the Arena. We start blaming each other for the shit that goes on in there, where does it stop?"

"It stops with you and all the Twos dead, is where it stops," says Eleven, and Roark goes cold. That's not just the ranting of a madman. There's certainty and smugness in his voice, and he glances up at the sky, his eyes tracking the grid, like he's waiting for something. Like he knows.

Brutus' lip curls. "So that's the way it's gonna be, then."

"Yeah, looks like it is." Eleven hefts his weapon. "I might not make it out of here, but neither will you, and neither will your crazy bitch of a district partner. That's good enough for me."

He charges. Brutus waits to make sure it's not a feint, that he isn't going to dash into the jungle at the last second, and when Eleven closes the distance with no room to manoeuvre away, Brutus whirls and drives his spear straight through his heart.

The cannon fires. The boy from Twelve claps his hands over his mouth, shaking, then staggers back into the trees and vomits all over his shoes. "Katniss," he says faintly, and saying that word seems to break something inside him because he snaps and goes running back up the hill, screaming for her.

Brutus looks down at the body at his feet. "What do you want from me?" he demands in a hoarse voice, and Roark doesn't know who he's talking to. "What the _fuck_ do you want from me?" His shoulders tremble with the force of everything he's holding back, and with a roar he drives the spear into the sand and takes off back into the jungle, following the path that Enobaria and Four took.

"What's happening?" asks one of the new thirteen-year-olds. The question, asked in a high, reedy voice, breaks the tense silence, and soon everyone is demanding to know what's going on as the cameras swing back and forth between the remaining tributes, too fast to make anything out. Seven, freeing herself from the vines and tripping down toward the beach. Twelve Boy, tripping and falling on his face and screaming his fiancee's name. Twelve Girl, staring dully at a knife clutched in Three's hand. A flash of Brutus in the trees. Enobaria and Four, running together - together? - toward the tree.

They may as well be a bunch of untrained kids from Ten, for all the discipline they show, but Roark can't stop himself from shouting either, and the trainers are frozen. They don't answer because they know, and Roark knows too. It's the Rebellion. They were all in on it, all of them except for the Careers, and now the Careers are going to pay - _again_ - for someone else's treason.

A cannon fires, but everything is crazy and Roark can't tell who it was. Probably Three's heart finally stopped. The cameras can't keep up, and they're treated to a view of a rat climbing up a tree while somewhere in the background Twelve Boy shrieks _Katniss!_ and she shouts _Peeta!_ in return, a pair of lunatics both.

It's seconds to midnight when the cameras finally get their act together. Enobaria and Four are at the tree, and they're not fighting and they're not killing and Roark doesn't know what's going on - and then the Mockingjay stands up on shaking legs and raises her bow, aiming away from the others. Roark has just enough time to make out the shining length of wire she's wrapped around her arrow when she fires it into the force field.

Every television screen in the room goes dark. The din of questions dies as thoroughly as though the trainers dumped a load of water on them from the ceiling sprinklers.

In the silence, one person speaks. "What just happened?"

A trainer shakes his head, and every kid in the room cranes forward. Questions bubble up in Roark's chest, in his brain, streaking down his limbs until he feels like he needs to run and jump and dance and climb and fight just to make it all go away. They all listen, waiting, straining for anything, for reassurance, for an answer.

Instead, the trainer stares wide-eyed at nothing and says the three words that are death to any Career: "I don't know."


	4. Chapter 3: Brutus, Peeta, Deception

Notes:

Brutus' death in the books is a footnote. Most people don't even remember it happened. (It's arguable Collins herself forgot until her editor pointed out she'd missed one.) It's easy to think that means it's not important, but it is. Turns out, District 2's decision to rebel (or not) is hinged on it.

* * *

**Chapter 3: Brutus, Peeta, and the Tragedy of Deception**

Theo is forty-one years old and remembers it like it was yesterday. He can't remember the name of his first girlfriend - he was thirteen, she was fifteen, it was wild and forbidden and thrilling and she had a tongue that could, well, never mind, and he's forgotten her name mostly out of deference to Cara who doesn't like to think about the ones what came before her - but he remembers everything about that day.

His kids, Capitol bless 'em, are past Reaping age and sick of the story, and Theo knows he probably should stop telling them year after year when the Volunteers stand up on the stage, proud and strong, because since they were twelve or so they have the whole thing memorized and can say the sentences along with him with sarcastic voices and exaggerated eye-rolling. He should but he can't. It's the only story he ever tells more than once, because it's the only story what matters.

Sara's gone and married now, got a baby of her own, a little burbling thing what can't talk yet and barely knows it's alive, and she tells Theo she's not letting him fill Marcus' brain with this stupid story, _no no no Pa you do not get a whole new generation to torture_, but Theo's damned if he won't. It's important. Markie wouldn't be here if not for this story, not Sara or her brother either.

"Yes, Pa," Sara sighs whenever they have this argument.

His boy resents the whole thing a little more than Sara, who mostly just thinks it's funny. "I don't know why you had to name me after him," he said to Theo more than once growing up, when he came back from school with a bruised cheek or broken glasses. "Everyone just keeps comparing me and making fun and I'm sick of it."

And it's true, Theo's boy is small and weedy and the only one in their whole family on both sides who needed glasses as a kid, and maybe with a different name not as many people would've noticed, but Theo's not sorry. He can't be. "I owe him everything," Theo always says. "Every breath you take, every time you cried and I took you for a walk around the house, every skinned knee your Ma and I kissed better, that's all because of him. You forget that, you may as well pay all those heartbeats back, you understand me?"

"Yes, Pa," he mutters, and takes off his glasses to wipe them on his shirt, and he might not be strong but he's smart and he's a good boy, and Theo loves him, his son. His Brutus.

Theo remembers, all right. Every detail, like the way his shoes pinched his feet and the collar of his shirt scratched against his neck with the starch his Ma only ever bothered with for Reaping Day. The beating sun on his back - he stood in the square so long after it was over that he got a burn, and later he peeled the skin off in one long strip and shivered when it came away from his neck. His arrogant, irritated boredom at the whole charade; his thought that he didn't know why they even bothered with the Reaping when everyone knew it would be one of those Centre kids who went.

That's the worst part, really. Theo'd been complacent, the same as a lot of people were complacent - and boy, the Capitol showed them, four years later when they told the Centre to withhold their Volunteers and two untrained kids went to their deaths for the first and only time in District Two since the teen years - and he hadn't thought about it. What did it matter? Whoever got Reaped, they'd still get to go back to their families. It would be like getting called on by the teacher for a question they didn't know, and when they didn't know it the teacher would move on to that kid in the back waving their arms and squealing "ooh, ooh, me me me!" A little embarrassing you couldn't do it, a wave of relief, and then life goes on.

Theo will never forget how wrong he was. Because it's not like that, not at all. Nobody tells you what it's like to get called, to have your name picked out of that bowl and read aloud through the microphone, to hear it bouncing off the walls and echoing in the square. To hear it taken up like a whisper by the people what know you, like a prayer, a benediction.

He knows now. Theo had been picking at a hangnail, trying to see if he could rip it off without tearing the skin underneath - always hurt more than they should, hangnails, for a tiny little rip in the skin it always stung like crazy - and he didn't even hear it at first. It was just a name, more stupid, pointless theatre, and the only reason he looked up at all was because nobody moved.

The escort cleared his throat. "Theodore Payne?" he said, the weird Capitol accent sliding up on the vowels, and this time it sank in through Theo's chest like a dagger underneath his ribcage.

Everyone knows that in District Two, their children are safe, that the Reaping won't touch them, because the Capitol is good and just and rewards those who serve it well, and no one serves the Capitol better than the people of District Two - the people who give their stone, their weapons, their soldiers, their children. When learning about the Reaping in school, the teachers talk about what it's like in the other districts, but they always add, "But not for you. And why is that?"

"Because the Capitol protects its loyal subjects," the children chorus, and the teachers say "That's right" and move on.

Everyone knows that. What they don't tell you is that when your name is called, you forget it entirely.

Theo remembers forgetting how to breathe, how the terror hit him in the chest like the time his brother threw him in the lake and he was too busy cussing Terry out to remember to close his mouth before the water smacked the air out of him. He just stood there, gaping like an idiot, while around him the crowd whispered and drew back and the cameras swooped in on him. He saw himself on those two-storey screens, a fifteen-year-old kid from the merchant quarters, son of a shopkeeper, with a mop of curls falling into his face and no more muscle on his arms than any kid who'd only ever had to haul crates of milk from the back door to the shelves.

The whole thing was stupid, it made no sense, because the Volunteers are a part of Two like the mountains and the lakes and the pine trees and the open quarries, but Theo forgot for those long thirty seconds as the silence stretched out throughout the square, silence except for the whispers - _that's Theo, that's Alan and Gina's boy, he just turned fifteen last week_. He forgot, and only one thought raced through his skull, like the model cars on those plastic tracks that sometimes come through into the store:

_Not me. Not me not me, please not me, not me I don't want to die I don't want to die not me I don't want to die please please please_ -

His breath choked in his throat and he couldn't breathe and his head swam, and Theo looked at the boy up on that screen, the wide eyes and blood-drained face, and he pictured that boy, that tribute - pictured _himself_ - stretched out dead on the rocks with his blood soaking the ground, and he thought, honest to Snow, that he was going to faint right there in the square.

Except that then the world righted itself again, because as Theo took the first, grinding step toward the stage, a voice cut through the square like the warning siren for a rockslide and pulled Theo away from the gates of hell.

Idiots say the three most important words in English are _I love you_. Those people don't know anything because they've never felt it, the terror and the smallness and the panic and helplessness and regret and everything else crammed into the worst half-minute of their lives, and if they'd felt it they'd know.

The most beautiful words in the English language are _I volunteer_, and Theo will go to his grave with those words ringing in his brain. They filled his thoughts for weeks after, stuck into his skin between his shoulder blades until the only thing he could do was save his allowance and pay a man with ink and needle to put them there for real.

The escort put his hand to his ear, theatrical-style, and actually pulled the 'What was that, dear, I didn't hear you', and so Theo got to hear it again, even louder, clearer, settling over him like a protective shroud. This time the cameras found the speaker, and Theo looked up at the screen and got his first look at his saviour.

Theo will always remember two things: the boy's arms, and his face. His arms were enormous, quarry-large and then some, and Theo thought his biceps must be the size of Theo's head. Not just strong arms but powerful ones, arms that spoke of the blood and weights and hours that went into getting them, arms that would make a tattoo artist salivate to paint those muscles with swirls of ink. And then his face: hard lines and a good, strong jaw, cheekbones that would forever make Theo's Ma sigh and his Pa pretend he wasn't jealous - but most of all the eyes. His eyes pierced Theo right through like the spear the boy would later use in the Arena, bright, bright blue like the sky on a clear day, blue and intense and proud.

Theo never thought about another man in his life the way he looked at girls and he hasn't since, but he swears, he looked into those eyes on that screen and fell in love for five unforgettable seconds. In later years he asked the other kids like him - the Saved, they called themselves - and found out he wasn't the only one.

("He's pretty, but he's not _pretty-_pretty," said one of the girls in his class, months later, when Brutus was back in Two, sound and safe to lust after. "He's man-pretty." Theo rolled his eyes at the time but later on he married her, so joke's on him, he guesses.)

"Well, aren't you a big fellow!" the escort said, laying an appreciative hand on the boy's muscles, and Theo remembers that he didn't even flinch, just stood there stony-faced and let the painted man with his sparkly wig stroke his arm like some kind of pet. "What's your name?"

He crossed his arms across his chest, and his muscles strained against the tight black shirt he wore; the beads on his bracelet sparkled in the sunlight. "Brutus," he said.

No last name, of course, because none of the Volunteers ever have one. Volunteers don't belong to the people that gave birth to them, not anymore; they belong to all of Two, as the avatars and the champions and the messiahs of the people, and shedding any name tying them to a particular family is part of that.

"Brutus," cooed the escort. "That's a good strong name. A Victor's name if I ever heard one, am I right?"

The silence in the square turned chilly there, because in Two it's bad luck to talk about Victory until it's over. The Capitol might be good but the Gamemakers like to play, and the one thing that's sure to tickle their fancy is when people get cocky.

And then the speeches and the handshakes and all the pomp, and then the tributes - Theo never caught the girl's name at the time and he's long forgotten it now, lost in a sea of teenagers gone and sacrificed - turned to go back into the Justice Building. Theo remembers his chest squeezing then, the feeling that he had to do something, acknowledge something, and so he pushed the crowd out of the way and ran for the stage. He couldn't think of anything to say - _thank you_ felt so stupid, so inadequate - and so he just stood there, heart thumping in his throat, and Brutus paused.

He met Theo's eyes for a few seconds, and Brutus didn't move or say a word or even blink, just looked at him before walking away, but when Theo touched his face afterward his fingers came away damp. Even after the square cleared out after the ceremony Theo stayed there, his feet stuck to the dust and gravel in the square, until the train whistle blew and he took off at a run for the station to watch Brutus leave.

For the next month, every blow Brutus dodged, every wound he survived, Theo thought, _that would've been me_. It was a stupid thought considering that Theo would've been dead thirty seconds after he left his platform, but he couldn't help it. The whole family watched Brutus' Games from beginning to end, sleeping when Brutus slept, and they shut down the shop during the whole time he was in the Arena because couldn't risk missing anything important.

Theo still remembers when the final cannon sounded and the victory trumpets played. Brutus stood over the twenty-third tribute, his hand with its broken fingers cradled against his chest after he staved in the other boy's skull with his bare fist, blood splattered all up his shirt like Mr. Hancock the butcher. His eyes were wide and crazed and his breath came short in his chest, and he stared at his hands like he couldn't believe they were attached to him. He stood there in a daze until the hovercraft landed, and by that point Theo and his family were in tears and nothing else mattered.

Theo has met Brutus twice after that. Once was during the welcome party at the end of Brutus' Victory Tour - as the one Brutus stepped in for, Theo got to stand up on the stage again and shake his hand, give him a bouquet of flowers and say thank you - and once again years later, when one of Brutus' tributes won her Games. When Theo's own Brutus was born he sent a picture of his baby boy with his little wrinkled face and his tiny fist, and he got back a short letter saying Brutus was honoured. Cara said he probably had his secretary write it, but Theo likes to think he didn't.

When Brutus Volunteered for the 49th Hunger Games, a piece of Theo's soul went with him, forever tied to the boy who saved his life, and Brutus returned it one month later in spray of blood, a symphony of ringing trumpets. Theo watched the closing ceremony from his house, but he still applauded with the Capitol audience until his palms turned bright red and stinging.

When Brutus Volunteers for the 75th, that bought-and-paid-for shard of Theo's soul goes right back into the Arena with him, except this time he doesn't get it back.

They watch the 75th together as a family, Theo and Cara and their empty nest filled up for three weeks as their Brutus brings his girlfriend and Sara and her husband and their baby show up and take the spare rooms. For once his kids don't tease him, they just sit in silence as the boy-now-man whose sacrifice is the reason for their existence goes back into the hell Theo escaped.

When the screens go black at the end of the Games, replaced by the spinning Capitol seal, Theo cried out like someone stuck a knife in his spine. There have been technical difficulties during the Games before - a moment last year when the Girl on Fire sat with the body of little Eleven before the hovercrafts came when the cameras cut away to Cato and Clove picking at the ruin of their supplies down by the lake; and again when Cato held Clove in his lap and growled terrible promises to her as he died - but never like this. Never a full blackout.

Theo has watched the Games for thirty years and he's never seen it stop like this, never seen Caesar Flickerman come back on screen an hour after the broadcast cut out, face pale under the caked-on stage makeup, announcing that the Games have come to an unexpected end and thanking everyone for their cooperation. "What's that mean, Pa?" Sara asks him, her voice high and small like she's a little girl again, and when he doesn't answer she grips his sleeve. "What's happening?" Theo just shakes his head.

For weeks there's nothing, no news at all. The 75th goes down as the only Games without a Victor, without an official casualty list, even, and Theo counts up the missing tributes on his fingers. The last death shown on camera was the one-handed man from Eleven, who took Brutus' spear to his chest; after that, nothing until the cameras shut down, leaving a handful behind. Both star-crossed lovers from District Twelve. The bitter girl with the axe from Seven. The pretty boy from Four. The nutty man from Three.

Brutus and Enobaria are on that list too, and Theo carries the hope in his chest because if he can't it will destroy him. There was one cannon in the middle of it all, one death unaccounted for, plus whatever happened after, and Theo needs the optimism like he needs air. Brutus isn't just the boy who saved Theo's life and gifted him with the best wife and children and adorable spit-uppy grandson a man could ever hope for. Brutus _is_ Two. He's everything good and strong and loyal and pure, he is truth and honour and devotion and sacrifice, and if the Capitol killed him -

The thought hits Theo between the shoulder blades one night, with Cara curled up against his side and his room awash with shadows, and Theo sucks in his breath and his heart pounds and every part of him shivers. If the Capitol killed Brutus - if they murdered their greatest, most obedient servant - then what good is loyalty? What good is sacrifice?

_The Capitol protects its loyal subjects_, the children used to repeat.

Except if Brutus is dead, then it doesn't. Not anymore.

Brutus can't be dead. Theo's chest tightens in panic, and he breathes out long and slow and does his best not to move and wake Cara. He can't be dead because that would be suicide for the Capitol, and the Capitol has ruled for seventy-five years and isn't stupid. They must have saved him. They must have sent in a team to rescue him when the rebels put their plan in place, they must have picked him up in their hovercraft and spent the last month patching him back up. Maybe he's out there now, fighting the rebels, bringing order to a country that's on the brink of destruction. He has to be. That has to be the answer.

If Brutus is dead - Theo's breath catches in his chest, his blood singing in his veins - if Brutus is dead then none of them are safe, because Brutus gave them everything, his blood and his breath and his heartbeat, not once but twice, which is twice as many times as anyone should ever be expected to give. If Brutus is dead then so is Theo, at least the part of him that matters to the Capitol, because if Brutus is dead then so is Theo's allegiance to his nation and its President, and he won't be the only one.

If Brutus is dead then so is District Two, because they were cleaved together long ago and there's no way to destroy only half a heart. Theo has stayed away from the rebellion - he bans anyone from his shop who even talks about it, not that there are more than whispers - but he thinks, he thinks that if the Capitol let Brutus die, then there's no point in staying true anymore.

The thought terrifies him, and Theo lies shaking in bed until the sun creeps golden and scarlet through the window, setting his room ablaze. He disentangles himself from Cara and stands in the shower with his forehead pressed against the tile, letting the spray beat down against his back - against the tattoo between his shoulders - until the water turns cold.

At breakfast, Cara sets down a plate of eggs and toast and bacon, and she sits next to him, perched on the edge of her seat like a bird ready to take off. "Theo," she says in a whisper, because they could be watching, they could be anywhere, that's the price they pay for their freedom, this constant vigilance and watchfulness, because with security comes a necessary lost of liberty and what is liberty without security, after all? "Theo, if they killed him -"

Theo sucks in his breath, but of course she's had the same thought, because she's his wife and they know each other better than any two people on the planet. "I know," he says, and his fingers tighten on his knife.

The television flickers to life with the customary blaring of the Panem Anthem, signalling a mandatory broadcast, and Theo jumps so high he nearly stabs himself in the eye. Cara looks at him, eyes wide. "Do you think they heard us?" she hisses.

"No," Theo says, not sure at all. They wait ten excruciating seconds for the tune to play out, and Theo's breakfast sits heavy and queasy in his stomach until the spinning logo fades, replaced by Caesar Flickerman's blinding smile. Theo exhales; it's unlikely, if the Capitol did have cameras in his house, that they'd send Flickerman to announce his death sentence.

"Well, well, well, folks, did you miss me?" Flickerman asks, mugging for the camera, and Theo knows a bit about showmanship as a shopkeeper but he still rolls his eyes. The audience screams. "I know, I know, I've left you all hanging for far too long, but I had some work done and I couldn't let you see me before I was ready." He smiles, puts on an embarrassed pout, and turns his face from one side to the other. "Still, worth the wait, don't you think?"

Cara clicks her tongue against her teeth. "Does he think we're stupid?"

Theo, like any citizen of Two, has tremendous respect for the Capitol's government, but not so much for the people. It's difficult, in a district where people make their living in the ground or with weapons, to feel much more than a sad contempt for those who prance about in finery. "He's just doing what he's paid to do," Theo says. They all know what that's like.

Flickerman chatters on for a bit longer, and Theo can't help wondering how this could possibly count as mandatory until Flickerman sits forward, giving the camera a conspiratorial glance. "But folks, don't get me wrong. I'm not just here to talk about myself, even though my new hair is quite fabulous. In fact, I have a very special guest for you today, someone you've all been dying to see, I think."

Theo sucks in a breath. It's Brutus, it has to be - who else would have Flickerman fluttering his hands and pretending to have a heart attack? It's Brutus, safe and alive and in the Capitol's care, and everything will be all right again. Cara reaches across the table and grips his hand.

"Everyone, please welcome, for the first time since the Hunger Games - Peeta Mellark!"

The same breath leaves Theo in a whoosh as though someone punched him in the chest, and disappointment sits in his mouth, bitter like the dregs of coffee when he's in too much of a hurry to let it sift good and proper. Peeta. The loverboy from District Twelve. Theo has nothing against him personally - he even managed to dredge up a bit of sympathy for the outlander when it turned out his girl was pregnant, because Cara lost one baby and Theo thought that was going to kill him - but he's definitely not the one Theo wanted to see.

He looks good, healthy and glowing and serious, which is interesting given that his wife-to-be has been floating around as the image for the growing Rebellion for over a year now, and hope starts up a small drum beat in Theo's chest. If Peeta Mellark, husband of the Rebellion, can show up in the Capitol after a month's absence, looking like he's been doing nothing but feasting and bathing in those rose-scented showers, then how much better off will Brutus be? The Capitol loves Brutus, after all, and he's the furthest thing from a traitor.

It makes sense that they would bring out the boy first, Theo admits grudgingly; he's the most popular in the Capitol, being the youngest and an expecting father as well. The audiences will fawn over him and coo and thank him for his bravery, and then Flickerman can move on to the more substantial guests, Theo is sure. Mellark alone isn't enough to warrant a mandatory broadcast.

It's a little like eating dessert before steak, and Theo chafes as Flickerman asks Mellark about the Arena. The boy paints a good picture with his words, and Theo knows that the audience will be speechless, taking in every word, but Theo has seen a lifetime of Victors from Two and he knows how it goes. It's not until Mellark mentions the rebels that Theo sits up and takes notice. He talks about the plan to electrify the lake, the scheme with the wire and the explosions, and this is where the Games broadcast cut off and now, to his chagrin, Theo is just as caught up.

"I can only remember bits and pieces," says Mellark, and Theo digs his fingers into the tabletop in frustration. He has to remember - he _has_ to. The boy had been on the beach with Brutus and the man from District Eleven when Brutus killed him. If they don't bring Brutus out after, then this statement could be all the news District Two will get of their champion. "Trying to find her. Watching Brutus kill Chaff. Killing Brutus myself -"

The world grinds to a halt, and Theo misses the next bit of Mellark's speech because his mind sparks and dies. He manages to claw himself back to just enough attention to make sure that there's nothing else about Brutus in the interview, no questions, no mentions, nothing. Flickerman just passes right over it, as though the murder of the hero of an entire generation wasn't just announced on live television. They talk about the Mockingjay, the rebellion, and whether or not her actions in the Arena meant she was part of it.

It's meaningless, all of it, because the Capitol will put it down the way it has every uprising since the Dark Days. This is fluff, a waste of time, especially since everyone and their grandmother's left ass-cheek knows that the Mockingjay is the symbol and beating heart of the traitor movement whether she says so outright or not.

The Mockingjay watched Cato - this generation's Brutus, the commentators said before he died - be torn to pieces for over eight hours before she decided to end his suffering. Theo swallowed his rage then because it was the Games and that's the way they're played, but that was before. Before her little lover turned around and stuck a knife in Brutus' back - because how else could the baker's boy take down the greatest warrior Panem has ever known? And for what? The rebel plan was in place, yet Mellark had stopped to make sure Brutus was dead instead of running. Maybe he hated Twos that much. Maybe the rebellion ordered him to. It hardly matters now.

On the television, Mellark blusters and waves his hands and covers his ass, claiming that he and his wife-to-be knew nothing, and the more he talks the less Theo believes him. It's clear that the Capitol caught him and he's doing his best to try to keep himself from being executed - part of a plea bargain, maybe, to keep the Mockingjay and their baby alive, if he rolls over on the rebellion and pretends he's not with them - but Theo isn't stupid.

First Cato, now Brutus. If there's a clearer way than outright murder for the rebellion to show just how much they think of District Two, Theo can't think of one.

The interview finishes, and the television flickers and fades to black, the screen crackling with static. Cara looks at Theo, eyes wide, and of everyone in his life, she knows and understands best just what this means to him. "Now what do we do?" she asks.

Theo thins his mouth. The dead are dead, and Brutus would not wish for weeping. Brutus understood the value of loyalty and hard work and perseverance no matter what happened. "Now I go open the shop," he says, clenching his jaw, and pushes his chair back from the table.

* * *

Coin's alerted to the broadcast only a few minutes before it goes live. Later, when she has time, she's going to find out who it was that slacked so badly and get them relocated to waste recycle management back in Thirteen, but for now she doesn't have that luxury.

"It's Mellark," says her contact into her earpiece, and Coin stiffens. "They're bringing him out to talk about what happened that final night."

"Wonderful," Coin bites out, and she sweeps her paperwork into a drawer and locks it, sticking the key back into place in the false molar at the back of her jaw. 'Paranoia' is just another word for 'long life'. "Any specs on the script?"

"Not yet, but we're looking. Whatever it is, it's locked down tight. They've been working him pretty hard the last couple of days, and now we know why."

Coin doesn't curse, because she's made of stronger stuff than that, but she does pick up her pace, heels clicking on the metal floor as she strides for the common room. Who knows what Mellark saw; even worse, what the Capitol put in his head. Her sources tell her he's been tortured the same as the others who got picked up at the end, and whatever he has to say in this interview isn't going to be anything her organization wants or needs to hear.

And here she thought she had a lock on all the prisoners' public appearances. Looks like one of hers is either a whole lot richer in money and poorer in morals, or floating face down in a river somewhere.

They'll program him to try to discredit their Mockingjay, Coin knows that much. They'd never let him on television if he wouldn't, and Coin can already guess the angle. Everdeen was scared. Confused. Stress and pregnancy hormones and fear of death made her fire at that forcefield. She saw Enobaria's face reflected in it and thought it was her. Something, anything to take her down a peg as the face of the new movement - not that she needs the help, since all she's done has been mope around and cry. Not for the first time, Coin wishes she hadn't put all her money on the wrong girl.

That, they can deal with; they can brand Mellark a traitor, talk about his weakness in rolling over on the movement out of fear for his own life or any number of things. Maybe later they can argue for brainwashing if need be. No, that's not what Coin's worried about; that's not what lengthens her stride and has her clenching her hands into fists.

As far as Panem is concerned, the 75th Hunger Games still has one death unaccounted for. One cannon without an owner, because the cameras didn't broadcast what happened to the rest of the country. Only two people, besides the Gamemakers, know whose last breath set off the eighteenth cannon, and that footage has long been erased now. Erased for good reason, as what it contained could very well light Panem on fire.

Coin saw what happened on her tiny screen in her office, on a channel so encrypted that if she didn't have the software herself she wouldn't be able to do it even if she set her whole team on it. She saw, and just about had a seizure as her hard work came this close to burning up into nothing when the Capitol executed Brutus and just about handed District Two the keys to its own rebellion.

It made sense, from a logistic perspective, but that didn't stop Coin from nearly swallowing her own fist. Throughout the course of the Games, Brutus had become increasingly erratic, insofar as a wall of muscle and principle was capable of complex emotion. Coin had watched the doubt stick its hooks into him, and her only hope was that they could finish their task and blow the whole place sky high before he did anything about it.

If Brutus made his doubts clear on national television, if he threw in his lots with the rebels, all of District Two would follow. The Capitol wasn't the only one afraid of that possibility.

Only a handful of people would have any idea what Brutus' conversation with Chaff on the beach meant, that the bastion of honour and sacrifice was thinking of turning his back on his makers. Coin still thanks the nonexistent higher powers that he encountered Chaff on that beach and not one of the softer victors, that the deaths of Thresh and Clove the year before hung heavy on their minds and stopped any meaningful discourse. For the folks at home it would be nothing but the usual, and Brutus' killing of Chaff only further confirmation that Twos were unfeeling monsters.

What Panem saw: Brutus, in a rage, killing Chaff on the beach. Brutus, running back to put a stop to whatever plans the others were hatching.

What District Two saw: their hero, loyal to the Capitol, continuing on his mission to win and bring honour to his district even as everything fell apart around him.

What the Gamemakers saw: a loyal man so broken by breach after breach of faith that he'd begun to think the unthinkable; that he'd avoided killing Katniss Everdeen in a desperate attempt to buy himself a ticket on whatever plane was leaving the island; that he'd killed Chaff out of self-defence and nothing more; that when he reached the others, one word from Enobaria and he'd join the rebels just as she had after only a few sentences from Finnick Odair.

What Coin saw: her nice, clean rebellion, full of exactly the kind of people she wanted, on the brink of being blown apart if District Two joined en masse, if it got out that Brutus had been thinking about hopping on board; her secondary enemy, the one that would outlast the Capitol and help unite the other districts when the inevitable peace led to infighting, becoming a dangerous ally instead.

The official broadcast cut away from Brutus the moment he entered the jungle. Coin received a feed from the mentor-only channel, which kept running on a backend server as part of a failsafe that Coin's people had designed so she could have access to uncensored footage in case it became useful. That meant that the people didn't see what happened.

Coin still can't get confirmation if it was one of the Capitol's Gamemakers or one of her spies that sent the order for the poison fog that killed Brutus, but either way, it doesn't matter. Brutus had to die and so he did, alone in the underbrush, twitching and thrashing as the toxin attacked his nerves. Anyone watching would have known it to be what it was: an execution, and in the few minutes it took him to die, he found the nearest camera and fixed it in his gaze.

The look he gave it would have turned the coldest heart to pudding. Even Coin felt the power of it, the depth of the betrayal and sorrow and regret before his eyes glazed over and the cannon fired, and if she'd wanted District Two on her side she would have pulled the footage herself, added it to the Rebel database and sent it out during the hour of blackout following the destruction of the forcefield.

But Coin doesn't want District Two to join the rebellion any more than the Capitol does, and so the footage was wiped and deleted from every possible database, with no one there to watch it. Only Coin, and one other: the mentor the original footage had been intended for.

When her contact sent her a message saying that Lyme, Brutus' oldest friend and assistant mentor to him in the 75th, had found them and demanded to be taken in, Coin wasn't surprised. She contemplated killing her, but in the end, allowed Lyme to join - Coin doesn't want Two, but one or two insiders and the information they contain is useful to her. Like Plutarch and the others from the Capitol, having a Two around gives the other recruits someone to sneer at in the corridors, to channel their frustrations when they might turn that toward the people who run Thirteen instead.

And now the Capitol is bringing Mellark in to talk about what happened.

Coin holds her breath when he says he doesn't remember; that confirms what her sources said, that the Capitol scientists worked on his existing trauma and expanded upon it, taking his memories and twisting them into exactly what they want. What that is remains to be seen. It doesn't make sense for the Capitol to reveal Brutus' death, but then again, if the Capitol were smart about everything then they wouldn't have a rebellion cracking their country into pieces, now would they. If their arrogance and stupidity ruins all Coin's hard work - if they think it's more important to brag than to contain the fire - well. Regardless of what Mellark says, Coin's work is going to go up in flames either way; the only question is whether it will be the kind that consumes or the kind that spreads.

Except then Mellark sits there up on that bedazzled stage and tells everyone that he killed Brutus himself, giving only a fragment of a sentence and half a breath to the act that could have thrown the most powerful district into Rebellion, had they only known the truth.

Coin couldn't have planned it better herself. She wonders, again, whether it was one of the Capitol's people or her own that planted that thought in his head and prompted him to say it. Just like with Brutus' execution, it doesn't matter. The effect remains the same. She glances around the room, checking the faces of her staunchest supports - Boggs, Paylor, even young Hawthorne - but they're all listening, waiting for the next part, for the punchline. For them, the announcement of a couple of deaths won't be the reason this interview was chosen as the first to break the silence.

The real meat of the broadcast, of course, is Mellark turning traitor and discrediting Everdeen, just as Coin predicted he would, but she already has contingency plans for that in place. The room flings itself into an uproar, and not one of them even blinked at the part where three little words - _killing Brutus myself_ - throws a bucket of water on every simmering fire in District Two. Of course they don't; to them, Brutus is Two and Two is loyal and therefore unimportant, and his disavowal of Everdeen's intentions at the forcefield is what matters here.

Coin knows that the real victory was won tonight on the other side of the mountains, where a people who might have begun to doubt have been tossed right back into line. A broken bone once mended is even stronger at the join, and nothing reaffirms a person's strength of conviction than having a doubt being proven false. Brutus' death was always going to galvanize them into action one way or another, but this way, with him remembered as being yet another footnote execution by the rebel movement, it will take a miracle to get Two to budge from the Capitol's side.

Across the room Lyme stiffens, and she's the only other person who knows the truth, but she'll also have to know that even if she said the Capitol had brainwashed Mellark into taking the credit, it wouldn't matter. Not here. No one here cares how Brutus died, or what that means; Coin isn't the only one with absolutely no interest in bringing District Two around. If they cared, they would question, because why wouldn't the Capitol have revealed the footage as a way to cement Mellark's statement as true? The Capitol wants District Two loyal, and on-camera shots of one of District Twelve's lovebirds stabbing their precious hero in the back would do more than a thousand threats to keep them from turning. If they had that, why would they not show it?

But nobody cares, and nobody asks, and when Everdeen-the-waste-of-space-and-resources runs out of the room in a funk, Lyme puts her war face on and turns back to the discussion at hand without bringing it to anyone's attention. Any mentor with her track history knows how to recognize a lost cause.

The hardest part for Coin is to keep the smile off her face as she listens to the others argue about whether to denounce Mellark as a traitor on their next propo. Today is a good day.


	5. Chapter 4: Lyme, Enobaria, Coin

**Chapter 4: Lyme, Enobaria, and Alma Coin**

"I think that's the last of them." Claudius wipes a hand over his forehead, smearing blood and sweat and grime everywhere. He looks savage in the dim light of the collapsed tunnel, teeth shining white in his dirt-streaked face, and Lyme claps him on the shoulder, sliding her hand up to the back of his neck to give her Victor a congratulatory shake.

"Think so," Lyme says. "Should do one more sweep just to check, but then I say we get out of here."

Claudius grins at her, but his hand trembles with exhaustion as he runs it through his hair. It's just the two of them in the remains of the mine; back in the conference, Coin agreed to leave one tunnel open for Lyme to help the trapped workers escape, but she refused to give them any backup. To everyone but Lyme, the entire rescue operation is a waste of time. She and Claudius been working alone in the tunnel for hours, trying to get the last of the miners out, and even Lyme is close to reeling from fatigue and the strain of staying on high alert. Meanwhile Claudius might be half her age but he's also half her size, and once they're out of here Lyme is getting her kid a drink, District Thirteen's rules be damned.

"Sounds good to me, boss," Claudius says, giving her a cheeky salute, but then he stiffens, eyes snapping wide and mouth falling open.

"What's wrong?" Lyme demands, glancing back over her shoulder. The tunnel is as loud as it is unstable, rocks and dirt falling to the floor, the distant rumble further back as the inner sections cave in, and Lyme can barely make out her own voice above it all. The light is dim, the only lantern not blown out in the explosion swinging crazily on the end of its chain, and the shadows bounce and disguise the dark stain spreading out across his chest.

Lyme is a warrior and a mentor and a surrogate mother to a handful of boys and girls who fought and killed their way to get back to her, and she's never seen such open shock on any of her Victors' faces. It throws her until he pitches forward, scrabbles at her shoulders and goes limp against her, and Lyme catches him under the arms as he sags. His head falls back and a damp warmth seeps through from his chest to hers and that's when she gets it. Lyme has lived through countless Games as a mentor where her tributes died in a spray of blood, and she never made a sound in the Control Room then, but she does now. It's a wild, broken cry of rage and pain that tears itself through her and leaves her aching.

She sinks to the ground - a rock digs into her knees but she doesn't care, it doesn't matter - and Claudius' weight settles itself heavier and heavier on her lap. He's still there for a few seconds, his mouth working, wet and dark and shining in the dimness, and Lyme hears the approaching footfalls - rhythmic and inexorable - but she doesn't move. There's no point now, and she could try to run (_where?_) but she doesn't. She stays with the rocks and the dust and the blood, and she cradles her Victor's face in her hands, presses her forehead against his and spends the last moments he has with her telling him he's perfect.

Claudius isn't her only Victor, and mentors don't play favourites so he isn't even that, but he's the one who came with her when she turned. The one who said he didn't give a Twelve's ass about the Rebellion but she'd have to kill him before he let her go without him, danger or no. Lyme looked into his wild, half-crazed Victor's eyes and knew he meant it, and so she let him follow.

Now she holds him as his last breaths rattle in his chest and his fingers spasm against her forearm. She holds him while he stiffens in her arms, and it's too dark to see the life leave his eyes but she's seen enough of that in her lifetime to need that for closure, really, and the thing about death is that none of that matters in the end.

Lyme looks up with her war face on, and straight into the barrels of twenty rifles. She's not afraid.

The phalanx splits down the centre, and Alma Coin strolls up, stopping about ten feet away. And of course she does, because she never gets her hands dirty, does she, Coin with her sharp-creased uniform and her waterfall-straight hair, and Lyme would trade every second of the next thirty years she'll never have for the ability to take Coin down before the others shoot her. She actually spares a second to case the tunnel for anything she could use, anything at all, but this was a rescue mission, not a battle, and Lyme could try to chuck the rock that's under her knee but even she can't throw to kill from this distance.

"You're not going to ask me why?" Coin says in her clipped accent, and the light paints her sharp-angled face like a death's-head mask.

Lyme curls her lip back. "Does it matter?"

Coin clicks her teeth. "To you? Not for long, I suppose, but wouldn't it give you some peace of mind first?"

Lyme glances down at the body cooling in her lap and swallows the surge of profanity that would only give Coin satisfaction. She raises her head and fixes Coin with a stare of cold fury instead.

"It's a compliment, really," Coin says with exaggerated sincerity. "Call it a testament to the strength of your character, your intelligence, even. You're too smart for the world I'm trying to build. You ask questions. You want to _negotiate_. And of course you're one of the finest, most decorated mentors District Two has ever seen, which to me feels rather like winning the Most Loveable Mass Murderer pageant, but people seem to like you." She pauses. "A lot of people. Not just your people. And I can't have that."

Lyme's hands tighten on Claudius' shoulders. They used to joke the Games had made him an old man at eighteen, because no matter how much the Capitol doctors worked on him, his old sword wound still twinged before the rain clouds came over the mountains. "What about him?"

"What, your loyal pup?" Coin snorts. "That's exactly what I'm talking about. Without you he's unusable. We had to put him down."

"And the rest?" Lyme spits out, unable to help herself. "You can't pretend you can actually convince the other Victors to join you. What are you going to do, storm the Village?"

"See, this is the problem with you and your little Two friends," Coin says, with a slow shake of her head. "You think that just because someone didn't go on a societally-sanctioned murder spree like you, they know nothing. You underestimate people who haven't gone through what you did. You don't need to worry about your fellow Victors, believe me. After I finish up here, it's all over."

"Bullshit," Lyme snaps. "Not even your army could take out the whole Village. You'd never make it past the gate."

Except it's harder to be confident about that with Claudius' corpse in her arms, the same boy who drove a sword through the final tribute's skull even as poison seared his veins, now lying dead and still. Lyme doesn't fear for herself - that burned away years ago, the last embers when she turned her back on the world that made her to join an organization that thinks she and her friends are soulless killers all - but now, she feels the sickening twist in her stomach when she thinks of the others.

"You're absolutely right," Coin tells her, her voice thick with exaggerated praise. "I couldn't storm your Village, not without losing more soldiers than I'm willing to sacrifice. That's why I took a more sophisticated approach. By the time you and your soldiers broke through the tunnel here, my hovercrafts had already razed your Village to the ground. I've since gotten the reports back from the first ground troops on the cleanup crew. Nobody alive inside, I'm afraid, though we'll have to put some of the pieces back together to make sure nobody got away." She smiles. "I've already come up with a name for it, for the history books, I mean - the Victors' Purge. By the time this is over, only a handful of you will be left to suit my purposes."

Lyme forces herself not to clutter her thoughts with the names and faces of the dead - her friends, her colleagues, her family forged through blood and steel and screams. She's known it was coming, that Two was always going to be caught in the crossfire and mourned by neither side. Just not like this. Despite her efforts, Lyme's mind stutters to a halt when she thinks of her mentor, the man who hauled her out of the abyss, who put her back together into a human being and not a trained monster, and gave her the foundation to do the same for others. She drags herself back.

"If it makes you feel any better, it's not just you," Coin continues. "The Victors in the outer districts aren't any use to me drowning in their own vomit. They'll be much more valuable as a symbol of the Capitol's final cruelty, the torture and murder of those thought to be in league with the new wave. As will you." She flicks her fingers, and the guns trained on Lyme sharpen in their alignment. "You will be the figurehead of martyrdom. The others, what do they have to lose? They're already broken, useless, but you, you turned your back on everything you held dear and gave it your all. One final sacrifice, one last time. I haven't decided on your last words yet, but rest assured, they will be appropriately stirring."

Lyme turns and spits into the dirt. "Go fuck yourself."

"Personally I think that's lacking that special something, but for a first draft I'll take it," Coin says, unperturbed. Then, almost lazily: "Fire."

The history books say Lyme died fearless and without regret. They're half right.

* * *

Every time Enobaria doesn't tell them what they want to hear, they take one of her teeth. Not that it comes easy. The first one who tries trades two fingers for it. Idiot. Enobaria swallows the chunks of flesh and laughs in their faces, blood running down her chin, and uses every bit of Career training not to gag when a knuckle catches in her throat on the way down.

After that they dose her with something that keeps her immobile but strips her nerves raw and screaming. It's worse than the Arena, the slow drain of her strength from hunger and blood loss; worse than training when they pumped her full of tracker jacker venom to see where her mind took her in its hallucinations so they could tease out her secrets; worse than when she was six and her middle brother pushed her down the stairs and her broken bone stuck out through the skin.

It doesn't matter. She doesn't tell them anything.

"Tell us what you know about the rebel plan in the Arena," says the voice above her.

Enobaria runs her tongue over the ragged gaps in her mouth. "Fuck you," she says. The man shrugs and reaches for the pliers.

The kicker is that Enobaria doesn't actually know anything. The darling rebels with their principles and their heads in the clouds, they don't trust the Careers, except for the pretty ones from Four which somehow managed to escape the sanctimonious judgement, bully for them. She and Brutus and Cashmere and Gloss went into the Arena with nothing - they died, _for nothing_ - and they watched the districts-wide alliance form and the plots hatching while they got dick-fucking squat.

She could tell them that, probably, and they'd believe her. Roll over onto her belly, play the loyal servant like Brutus and beg them to accept her, but Enobaria is done with that. Even Brutus had turned in the end, letting the Mockingjay live instead of finishing her off in the bushes in the hopes it would get them at least a scrap of information, and all that got him was a cannon.

Even without that, Enobaria has played Capitol dog for too many years - killed their children; let them sharpen her teeth and make the most disgusting, horrifying moment of her life into a punchline; let them into her head to twist and pull and yank until only her mentor could card her thoughts like wool.

The Capitol took everything that Two ever gave them, ate it, shat it out, then served it up on a plate and had the gall to call it dessert and expect them to smile and eat up. They messed with Enobaria's family. Not the one who dropped her off at the Centre doors when she was twelve, who paled when they saw her in the Justice Building six years later, and apart from her next-oldest brother who showed up once just to look at her and see if the rumours about her fangs were true, never bothered to call after she came back. The family she earned, paid for with her blood and sweat and sanity and even her teeth, ripped out by the Remake Centre while she lay unconscious, only to wake up with a mouth full of blood because she'd sliced her cheeks six times in her sleep.

The Capitol took everything. Enobaria's not going to give them shit, not even if it makes her life easier.

They will kill her, in the end. Enobaria has no doubts about that. The Capitol will use her until she's not fun anymore and then they'll kill her, and there will be no rescue, not from Two, which doesn't know she's alive and can't risk it anyway, and not from the Rebels, who likely do and can but sure as the Reaping won't bother.

When they're not interrogating her they leave her alone in a tiny, cramped cell with a hard bench and a bedpan that only gets emptied once every couple of days. Enobaria rips strips from her clothes and shoves them into her mouth to stop the bleeding.

She's thirty-one years old, and that's thirteen years older than she was ever guaranteed to get. It's been a good run. Well, technically speaking it's a long, empty, fucking waste of a run, just that there's not much point in crying about that now. Her only regret is not burning the entire country to the ground and salting the ashes, but if wishes were tesserae no one would starve.

Enobaria is ready to die. Not thrilled about it, she's not exactly throwing a party, but if nothing else, a Career knows how to prepare for it. She did it once at eighteen and again just a month ago, and now it's more like an unfortunate fact than anything else, like a date that keeps standing her up but promises this time he'll show. The Centre taught her well.

When Enobaria was fourteen, soon after her first kill test, she and the others in her year were dragged into a sealed room, locked in, and the whole thing flooded with nerve gas. The last one awake and able to solve a simple math problem was the winner. Afterward the trainers broke it all down, told them what they'd done wrong and how to improve, and the next week when they tried it again, half of them were standing when the doors opened. That's not the kind of lesson a girl forgets.

Now, Enobaria smells the sickly-sweet stench of knockout gas, and jumps awake, every cell in her body shrieking in alert. For the first time since she folded up her legs on the too-short bench and tried to sleep, she's grateful for the ridiculously tiny cell. Nerve gas is heavier than air; back in training, the first kids to pass out had been the ones who'd dropped to the floor, thinking it would act like smoke. If she can get herself up high, it will take a while for the whole room to fill up enough to reach her. If she can stop too much more from coming in, at least she'll be able to get the drop on whoever comes in after her.

They didn't come for the bedpan today, and that's something. Enobaria wrinkles her nose, but a little piss isn't much to a Victor, especially when it's hers. She strips off her shirt, tears free the bottom hem, and dunks the whole thing in the bedpan. The urine is stale and stinks to high hell when she wraps the smaller length of cloth around her face, but it will block out most of the gas as long as she doesn't have to deal with it for too long. She tosses the rest of the shirt over her shoulder, presses her back and feet against opposite walls and scales the cell up until she can stuff the last of the cloth into the vents.

Enobaria doesn't want to know why they're gassing her cell now, but she doubts it's for a surprise birthday party. Maybe they are just going to kill her - but it's one thing for Enobaria to decide she's not afraid, and another just to sit there and wait for it. She hauls herself higher, back flat against the wall, and ducks her head down with her chin pressed hard against her chest so she can scoot up, her shoulders pressed to the ceiling. It's been a long, long time since Enobaria's field test at the age of fifteen, but she still remembers holding herself in a tunnel wall for eight hours until the water beneath her receded. If nothing else, Enobaria can give them one hell of a surprise before they put her down.

Except then she hears it: voices calling out names, specific names, very familiar names, because they're the people who were picked up with Enobaria when the Capitol landed. Through the walls Enobaria makes out the sound of regulation military boots and voices muffled by some sort of respirator or mask. She frowns, still breathing shallowly, and gives herself a hard pinch in the thigh when her eyes start to flutter shut.

"I've found Annie Cresta!" someone shouts, and Enobaria stiffens. It's not a murder campaign: it's a rescue party. The rebels have actually gotten off their asses to do something. "People, report!"

"Johanna Mason here," calls someone else. "Peeta Mellark's in the next cell."

Enobaria's muscles burn - yeah, she's braced herself in a similar position and held out against nerve agents for longer than a few minutes, but not at the same time, not for at least a decade, and not after weeks of torture - and she tries to ignore the embarrassing rush of relief that floods her. She's getting out of here, and once she does, she's going to make the Capitol wish they'd just killed her in the Arena with a bolt of lightning. The rebels are a bunch of worthless good-for-nothings, but at this point Enobaria is willing to play ball.

At least until a rough voice says, "That's everyone."

Enobaria hisses against the piss-soaked rag over her mouth. Another says, "What about the one from District Two? She's not on the casualty list."

"They probably sent her home with a commendation," says the first in a dismissive tone. "You really think they're going to hold a Two here? If nothing else, the Capitol protects its pets."

Enobaria thinks of Brutus, serving year after year after year, sending children to their deaths because if he stops believing it's right then everything around him crumbles. This just confirms that the cannon she heard was his, and she's going to find the fucker who killed him and tear their throat out all over again, once she gets herself a new set of teeth.

Except she won't. Because they're not going to save her. They're not even going to try. Enobaria could pound on her door and wail and shout and beg them and they still wouldn't do it because she's a Two and these people think they know what that means, they think they have such a handle on everything. Chances are they'd leave her here, then go back and tell everyone she was sipping champagne with the torturers. Rage and frustration well up in Enobaria's chest, but there's nothing she can do about it.

"Powering down in five," says someone else in a clipped voice, and Enobaria has just enough time to wonder what they're talking about when the countdown reaches one.

The lights black out. Down the corridor, Enobaria hears the heavy screech and scrape of doors opening, and that's when she gets it. They've shut down the power to the building to bypass the electronic locks on the doors. Since they'd have no way of knowing ahead of time who was in which cell, that means they couldn't have pinpointed them. That means Enobaria's door is likely open, too.

She's not going to get another chance. The room has stopped filling with gas - or her makeshift mask is keeping the worst of it out - but it's still colourless, and she's not sure how high up the saturation stopped. If Enobaria jumps down, she could land straight into a soup and pass out. Still, any Victor knows that a small chance, no matter how infinitesimal, is not no chance, and nobody - not her parents, not her brothers, the Centre, her mentor - raised her to sit by.

Enobaria drops down and tries the door. There's no handle on the inside, and so she sticks her fingers in the gap between the wall and pulls. At first she thinks it's locked, but after she wrenches a second time and it budges an inch she realizes it's fine, but starvation and everything else have made her weak. It's disgusting, that she can't even remember how many people she's killed anymore but she also can't open a damn door. The thought of dying _now_, with escape so close, just because she's been tortured into incapacitation is unacceptable, and Enobaria sets her whole weight back, tearing at the edges while her nails peel away until she can stick her foot in the gap.

She doesn't need much. Soon enough she's through, and Enobaria doesn't waste trying to follow the rebel soldiers because at this point she's pretty sure they'd just shoot her and make something up later. The halls are filled with sleeping gas, she hasn't slept properly or eaten a full meal in six weeks, she's missing half her teeth and fingernails, and the only thing between her and unconsciousness is her own bodily waste and a hell of a lot of stubbornness, but hey. May the odds be ever in her favour.

Enobaria curls her lip at the din behind her, leaps over the body of an unconscious Capitol guard, and runs.

Weeks later, holed up in a shitty apartment in the middle of the Capitol slums because she can't risk taking the train back to District Two, Enobaria gets a visitor. Most of her injuries have healed, but she hasn't been able to find anywhere willing to fix her teeth without requiring identification and that wasn't also sketchy as fuck, and Enobaria's isn't expecting anyone.

It's probably another fucker trying to get her to sell herself for drugs, and she makes her way over to the door to tell them off, snagging a knife on the way over. Enobaria opens the door without taking off the chain, but also makes sure to stand to the side so they can't shoot her or stab her through the gap. "What?" she asks.

"I have a proposition for you," says the woman on the other side of the door, bold as shit and cold as steel. It's not any of the Victors Enobaria recognizes - and she would, anyone sane and sober enough to sound like that Enobaria would know - and that isn't good. Especially not if this woman knows who Enobaria is.

"No," Enobaria snaps, and shuts the door. She'd say "Fuck you in the ear" but she needs all her teeth for that, and Enobaria has practiced which words she can say without giving away the part where she sounds like a geriatric.

"I think we can come to a mutual understanding," says the woman smoothly. "We both hate the Capitol. We both have grudges. And neither of us think that the Mockingjay is actually good for anything besides being a rather pathetic figurehead. I need someone with your resourcefulness and lack of moral complications. You, I think, need a good hospital, a good dentist, and no questions asked."

Enobaria narrows her eyes. "Home," she says, and the words sound strange and wooly in her mouth, but she makes them work. "I want to go home."

"Oh," says the voice with the sort of sympathy that means your bad news is their birthday. "I'm afraid you don't have one, not anymore. Your Victors' Village burned yesterday, after some of the stonecutters revolted. You're all that's left."

Enobaria can remember the taste of that boy's skin and blood in her mouth clearer than she can her mother's cooking; she still feels the pull and give as the flesh tore beneath her teeth. She can rattle off the death list for every year up until her Games - and a few after, just for fun - in any order anyone might ask her. She can't, however, remember the last time she cried. It's been so long that she doesn't even realize what's happening, just registers the burn in her eyes and the tightness in her throat, and it's not until a breath rips itself out of her chest with the force of a physical blow that she wipes her eyes and processes the wetness on her hand.

All of them. Her family, the only one that matters, gone. All because of a war they refused to fight.

"No," Enobaria says again, because what else can she say. The television hasn't broadcast anything about it, but then again, it's been nothing but the war between the rebel and Capitol techs to send out a few seconds of propaganda so heavy with bias on either side that it may as well just be footage of people masturbating, and Enobaria eventually got disgusted and turned it off. She hasn't bothered watching anything, even to glean scraps of information, for the past few days at all.

"I'm afraid so. But I'll keep you safe. Fix you up, find you somewhere to stay until it's time for you to come out. It's almost over; your district was the last to fall to the Rebellion. It's just a matter of time now before we take the Capitol."

Enobaria steps to the side and looks through the gap in the door at the tall, stately woman with an impassive face and straight grey hair. She still doesn't remove the chain. "Tell me," she says.

It takes Enobaria all of five minutes to figure out that Alma Coin, leader of the Rebellion, is a fucking liar and a snake. The Rebels are the ones who bombed the Village, and Enobaria will bet every cent of her Victors' stipend on that; the Capitol might take them in and torture them for information like they did her, but they wouldn't bomb the whole place out of the sky. That doesn't match the way they've been painting Two as a haven of Capitol favour for the past seventy-something years in order to keep the other districts hating them.

What's worse is that Coin clearly doesn't give a damn whether Enobaria knows or not; Enobaria isn't sure whether Coin thinks she's too stupid to figure it out or that she can't do anything about it, but either way, Coin is convinced that they're kindred spirits and none of it matters. Which, in a way, is true; it doesn't matter whether the Capitol is the one who slaughtered the Two Victors, because Enobaria wants Snow and his cronies dead either way and that comes first.

Taking down the Capitol is not the problem; Enobaria can't do that on her own, especially not with all the Twos dead, and she'll work with anyone, traitor or no, to get that done. The only difference is what Enobaria will do after that, and so she smiles at Coin and agrees to side with her in her decisions and plans the day when she puts a knife through each of the Two-murderer's eyes and tears her heart out.

Regardless of what everyone in Panem thinks, Enobaria hates the taste of blood and skin and muscle. She hasn't eaten meat since the Arena, other than dumb Capitol engagements where, to keep up her image, she eats steaks without bothering with a knife. For this cold monster-woman, Enobaria will make an exception just this once, and maybe she'll leave Coin's eyes for last after all so that the bitch can watch as Enobaria rips her heart in two with her teeth.

Coin talks about mutual goals and cooperation and common enemies, and Enobaria nods and imagines sticking knives through her hands and feet, skinning her like a rabbit, and plucking out her ribs like Cato did to the boy from Eleven just over a year ago.

"Two?" Enobaria asks when Coin finally finishes. "My people." She stretches out her arms in a lazy motion, flicking her fingers so that two knives appear in each hand when she had none before. It's useless - no one who could orchestrate a rebellion like this would ever come alone to an unstable enemy Victor, Coin likely has snipers or at least a dead-man's switch on her, possibly both - but sometimes when there's nothing left to do, empty gestures are all you can do.

"The district's been taken," Coin says with a shrug, and Enobaria notes the choice of words: _taken_, not _turned_. The battle isn't even won and already the narrative is being spun. Her district would not have been won over by the propaganda and false promises of the Rebellion, not after Cato and Clove. Not after Brutus. That might even have been the point. "As long as everyone cooperates, I foresee no problem. You should be able to help with that."

From one puppet-master to another. The difference is that this one has nothing to hold over Enobaria's head, which means Enobaria will stay loyal for exactly how long their goals stay mutual and not a second longer. As soon as President Snow breathes his last, Alma Coin will breathe hers. Then maybe this discordant mess of a rebellion will finally have some hope of coming together into something that won't just descend into anarchy, tyranny, or both.

Enobaria swallows her disgust and nods.

"Good," says Coin, smiling in a way that doesn't touch her steel-grey eyes. "Let's get those teeth fixed, shall we?"

She stays low after that, healing, gathering strength. Biding her time. Any good Career knows how to wait, how to read the threads of the alliance and know when it's cracking, know when its usefulness is over and the time to strike has come. Not yet. Not yet.

Enobaria fights in the battle of the Capitol with the rest of them, and she wears the grey rebel uniform with a scarf over her hair and carries a gun instead of her knives. For the time being, Enobaria has had enough of public recognition and killing for the camera, and more importantly, being held accountable for every murder. Enobaria the Victor would have each death splashed across the propos to use as fire for the Rebellion - see how even the Capitol's vicious hound has turned - and fuck that. She kills them because they took her childhood, because they ate popcorn and turned the single most disturbing moment of her life and turned it into a meme.

When a Capitol-owned Peacekeeper turns and raises his weapon, Enobaria hefts the unfamiliar pistol and sends a bullet right through the middle of his skull. It's the first life she's taken outside the Arena, and her insides twist with a measure of guilt and dirty shame because she _liked_ it. It's everything she ever wanted when she raged behind the Village walls during her recovery, having the power to take everything levied against her and turn it back.

But it's emptiness, too, and the more she kills the stronger that grows. These people who line up for their paycheques are merely the perpetrators of the atrocities, not the orchestrators. Killing Peacekeepers brings no real satisfaction, and with every life she takes, the void in her soul grows deeper. Sixes turn to morphling; without their Village, their mentors and their doctors and their medicine, the Twos would find a much different, darker drug.

She feels no remorse for the soldiers themselves - Enobaria knows a thing or two about duty, but she and the other Victors have earned theirs with blood and broken bones and months and years of nightmares, and these people have had none of that - until somewhere in the midst of the melee it hits her that these soldiers came from Two. Her district farms soldiers for the Capitol like Eleven grows fruit, and just like the apples, the soldiers she's fighting have their roots in other soil. The Capitol is an evil, twisted place, a sink of privilege and hypocrisy and willful blindness, but Two made the Peacekeepers. Grew them in the same environment as the ones who went on to be Victors.

With her Village gone and death around her, it's all just another game. It's the districts murdering each other all over again, only this time it's the rebellion pulling the strings. Enobaria growls, shoves her gun into her belt, and dives back through the crowd to the edge of the battle. She gets out of range just before the whole thing goes straight into the Arena.

When the bombs fall, Enobaria is surprised along with the rest of them, just not for the same reason. Later the others marvel that the Capitol would be so cruel as to murder children and the injured when they had no hope of victory anyway, but Enobaria can't believe everyone fell for it. She sees Coin's hand in it as clearly as if it was that woman's name splashed across the bottom of the hovercrafts instead of the Capitol's seal, and the Capitol is vindictive, cruel, and prone to overplaying its hand for the sake of one last jab, but it's not idiotic. There's nothing to gain by blowing up the square, not for them.

Any Career knows how to follow the trail of advantage, and in this case it leads straight back to the spider at the centre of the rebel web and the outraged people now rallying fully around her cause. Enobaria would admire her for her sheer, dispassionate cunning, except that even a trained killer can reach her fill of manipulative assholery. Enobaria doesn't care about the dead. She does care about another government willing to lie and murder and frighten the people into obedience.

Enobaria does not forget her promise to herself. As soon as Snow dies, so will Coin, and whatever they do to her in retaliation - an what will they do, kill her? torture her again? send her into an Arena for the _third_ time? - won't matter. However history marks the deed, Enobaria will have the satisfaction of knowing she's done something toward the greater good, for perhaps the first and last time in her life.

After the Capitol falls, Enobaria gets another phone call. "I'm having a meeting with the remaining Victors," says Coin. "It's very important, and I'd like you to be there. I think you'll appreciate what I have to say as well." She pauses, either for effect or waiting for Enobaria to answer, but either way, Enobaria stays quiet and Coin soon continues. "It's about the future. I think you'll want to see it."

Enobaria runs her tongue over the backs of her teeth. Maybe with the Capitol fallen she can finally get them filed down, not have to worry about slicing her tongue in half and choking on blood in the middle of the night. She hasn't slept on her back since the Arena. "How many of us are left?"

Seven, as it turns out. Six other Victors, plus Enobaria, are all that's left of Panem's finest, the fifty-nine Victors who hadn't drunk themselves to death or jumped off a train or walked out past the district boundary fence and never came back. That's eighteen gone in the Quarter Quell and thirty-four others just lost to oblivion. The Twos, Enobaria knows, died in their beds when the Village burned, but they were just over half the remaining Victors. That still leaves a handful of Ones and a sprinkling of outliers whose names get added to a casualty list and forgotten.

Actually, two lists, and they're careful to pull it out of sight when someone sees the spasm of rage that crosses Enobaria's face. The dead Victors are split in two, one list for 'heroes of the rebellion' and one for 'traitors to the cause'. Enobaria isn't supposed to see it, but for someone with the most famous smile in Panem, she can be stealthy when she wants to, and she catches sight of Brutus and Nero on the 'traitor' list before the paper gets whisked away. So that's how they're going to play it. Enobaria wishes she could be surprised, but every peace needs somewhere to focus its anger so everyone can unify in the absence of their fallen common enemy. Looks like the new regime found theirs.

Enobaria knows how to play the game better than anyone, and until she knows where the others stand, it's better to keep in character. She leans back in her chair and surveys the other Victors as they enter, outliers all and not a single friend among them. Apart from Beetee, who takes a chair in the middle, the others huddle together at the far end of the table, putting as much distance between her and them as they can. Their disdain and confusion colours their expressions, twisting their mouths, apart from Annie, who sits and stares at the tabletop. She, at least, seems saner after her husband's death; maybe it's the reality of having to raise her son without him that's forced her to throw off the convenient veil of madness. Either way, her indifference at least trumps the outright hostility or fear from the others.

Coin informs everyone that Enobaria is protected under something she calls the "Mockingjay Deal", that as one of the Victors captured by the Capitol she was given amnesty in exchange for Katniss' participation in the Rebellion. She doesn't bother telling them that Enobaria has already fought for it, and they don't ask; Enobaria casts her gaze around the room at the neutral, unforgiving faces, and she wonders if any of the three who were in the complex with her heard her screams. She certainly remembers theirs.

Johanna curls her lip at Enobaria and gives no hint of whether she knows. Her hand twitches like she wishes she had an axe right there in her pocket. She looks straight at Enobaria, lone survivors of their districts and of torture both, and tells her they'll kill her anyway.

_You can try, little girl_, Enobaria thinks, but she doesn't say it. She just smiles, slow and lazy, and acts as though she doesn't feel more alone in this moment than she has in her entire life. The girl with the axe isn't the only one left with nothing to lose.

When they call for the vote on the final Hunger Games with Capitol children, Enobaria knows which way she will swing. She needs to show the people that the new regime they've put in place is no different from the old one, that she lost her friends and family to topple a world that's going to be built right back up again, just using different coloured brick. Some of the others, weak and stupid, don't see it, and they argue for morality and fairness because they don't realize that stopping this one particular example won't change a thing, just keep the rotten core hidden for longer.

Enobaria wants this stinking, mouldy fruit torn open to the centre and strewn at the feet of the people for all to see. If her entire life has been wasted, if she looks at where she is and what she's managed to claw out with her and feels nothing but emptiness and cold despair, then so can everyone else. Let the idealists understand what it's like to have everything they hold true turn to dust in their mouths and choke them.

And so, when they call her name, Enobaria votes yes. "Give them a taste of their own medicine," she says. She doesn't specify which 'them'.

Enobaria stands on the ground with the other Victors, silent and seething and twitching with rage and impotence, as Katniss Everdeen stands in front of ex-President Snow with her bow at the ready. She has just as much right to do the honours as every Victor standing, but no more. Johanna Mason's entire family choked to death on their own pain and vomit in a spray of blood and bullet casings because she refused to play the Capitol whore. Haymitch Abernathy's loved ones barely got to see him come home, dead mere days after he returned to Twelve. Annie Cresta lost first her sanity and then her husband. Even Beetee has seen more tributes go to the slaughter than any mentor left alive, and only brought back a handful of them. Enobaria lost every person she's ever loved.

Katniss lost a fake unborn baby and her district, but she got to keep her family and friends and even her stupid cat. No one with a history of trauma and loss could deny Katniss' pain, and Enobaria and insanity are long-time lovers and she knows it when she sees it, but she doesn't buy for a second that this slip of a girl is the one with the strongest argument for taking the shot. It's symbolism, nothing more, but it only cements Katniss' image as the great martyr to the cause in the people's minds, and it makes Enobaria sick.

Nothing to be done about it; Enobaria can't exactly knock her out and take the shot herself, and so she reminds herself that she'll still get Coin. Partial revenge is better than none.

Except that the Girl on Fire surprises Enobaria one last time. Enobaria sees Katniss change her mind before the girl moves. She has been fighting since she could walk, and training for it before all her baby teeth fell out, and Katniss' actions broadcast themselves like the banners projected onto the Arena's ceiling grid. She sees the tension in Katniss' shoulders, the line of muscle in her neck, and she knows that the arrow will fly in the wrong direction before it's even fully nocked. Enobaria waits until Katniss' fingers leave the string and then she's running, up the stairs to the podium. She reaches Snow at the same time that Coin's body hits the ground. She won't have this opportunity again. Enobaria will die before she wastes it.

Pandemonium erupts around her. Guards grab for Katniss, rush to check Coin's body - gone, gone, Enobaria doesn't have to look to know what the wet _crack_ of a skull splitting open on concrete sounds like - and nobody notices the woman standing in front of the former President, still lashed to his pole.

"Well, well," he laughs, and blood bubbles out between his swollen lips. "Here to take our revenge, are we?"

"Only reason you're still alive is I haven't figured out the most satisfying way to kill you yet," Enobaria says. It's amazing, really. She's thought about this in the dark recesses of her mind for years - she's not Brutus, never has been, and treason burned in Enobaria's bones long before the Rebellion patented the statement - but now that it's here, she can't decide. It's standing in front of the weapons in the Cornucopia all over again. The crowd surges around her. Only a matter of time before someone remembers to check on the prisoner.

"Killing me won't bring them back," Snow says. "It won't even be proper justice. You know it wasn't me who had your little friends executed."

Enobaria steps in close. No weapons. If there's any marks on him it might make him a martyr somehow, a victim of the new regime's brutality, and Enobaria is happy to help rip Coin's Capitol 2.0 from its foundations but she's not elevating this monster of a man a single inch to do it. "It really doesn't matter," she says, her voice like steel.

He chuckles again, coughing and sputtering as he chokes on his own blood. "And are you willing to become even more of a monster than you already are?" Snow asks, fixing Enobaria with his snake-eyed stare. "Are you willing to kill me to exact a revenge that isn't true? Are you ready to know, for the rest of your life, that you're every bit the murderer that they paint you? That, in the end, you're just as bad as I am?"

Enobaria smiles, shows him a grin full of the teeth his minions gave her. "Yes," she says, hissing on the 's'. "I am very much okay with that."

She locks her gaze with his, wraps her hands around his throat, and pushes down.

Once it's done, Enobaria raises her hand, coated with the mess of blood, foam and spittle he vomited out before the end, and very deliberately, licks her fingers clean, cementing the taste of his death in her mind even as her stomach rebels. It's old blood, stale and sick and sour with poison, and she'll probably have to go to the hospital later to get the antidote, but it's worth it. The taste will never, ever leave her mind as long as she lives.

She stares at Snow's corpse, and in the end, bodies are only bodies. In the end, Cato is no more dead than Snow, despite his death taking an entire night and Snow's only minutes. Lyme isn't any more dead just because they dragged her corpse out of the rubble days later and had to check her dental records to identify the smashed remains. Enobaria's mentor isn't any more dead because he burned to death in his home, a home bought and paid for by the blood of the children he murdered to get there. Neither is Brutus, who stayed loyal almost to the very end because he thought that would save him, save his people, and had his final moments to mull over just how wrong he was.

They're all dead, and Snow is right. His death didn't bring them back, and it didn't make it any easier on them before, when they choked on blood, asphyxiated, turned to ash. But Enobaria looks at her hands and remembers the flutter of his pulse as it faded beneath her fingers, stares at his glassy eyes and recalls the exact moment that the life left them, and you know what, she does feel better.

The panic is dying down, and Enobaria steps back, wipes her hands on her pants, and vaults down from the platform, slipping into the rabble. Behind her, a cries goes up; the crowd has noticed Snow's dead, and a whole new kind of chaos erupts. Enobaria guesses there won't be much left when the authorities finally remember to find him.

(When they do the reports are ambiguous - choked to death on his own blood, or asphyxiated by the press of the crowd - and Enobaria reads the papers with a snort and a wolf's smile.)

President Snow is dead, long live the President, and the woman who would have been his successor in more ways than one had the pieces of her head picked up and placed along side the rest of her in a body bag. Enobaria would rather have her family back, but in the absence of that, she'll take this. She returns to her apartment and sleeps, if not well, then at least enough for the first time in months.

She walks through the ruins of her home, carrying a large grocery bag that clinks against her side. The guards stationed at the perimeter of the ruined fence - for what, she has no idea - give her a look like they mean to stop her, but guns or no, they stand down when Enobaria gives them her best unimpressed stare. "Step aside, kids," she says in a voice calmer than any she's used in months, and they do. One even shivers as she passes. At least her legacy is good for something.

It's nothing but ash and blackened brick, and Enobaria's boots turn over the occasional charred stump of bone that she doesn't bother to try to identify. It doesn't matter whether it was Coin or Snow who ordered the attack; both of them are dead, and the people of Panem are grateful regardless that the village of monsters got put in its proper place. Enobaria is the only one left to mourn, and while normally she would be sticking her knives into any target she can find or training in the gym until her muscles turn to jelly, anything to blot it out, this time she can't. It's just her. Someone has to do the honours.

The Village is gone but Enobaria's memories aren't. Even without the landmarks to guide her - the trees all burned, the oaks and birch and pine, even the apple grove near the path up to the mountains - Enobaria knows her way. She stops at every house, where they used to be, and she stands in the centre of each square of rubble and leaves a token.

At Lyme's, it's a bottle of the finest bourbon - Lyme's famous for loving what Nero snortingly called her 'asshole rich man drinks' - upended over the crumbled remains of red brick and white trim. Brutus, a few piles of rubble down, gets a similar treatment with his favourite brand of District Two microbrew, his tastes being a surprise to no one, ever. Claudius, one of Lyme's Victors and one of the few Enobaria understood a bit better than the others because he was always a little broken, like her, gets an apple, propped against a surprisingly undamaged window shutter.

Enobaria leaves a cigar for Ronan, Panem's first Career Victor, who spent the last few years blowing smoke rings and rocking in his chair embracing old age and encroaching senility as a reward for the life he made for himself in the Arena. Artemisia, just five years before Enobaria herself, gets a package of brandy-filled chocolate.

She saves Nero for last. Nero, her mentor, the man whose patience and strength are the reason Enobaria's still here, not locked up somewhere with padded walls and clipped-to-the-quick fingernails. Nero, the only man who could call her 'Bari' and leave with all his blood safely inside his veins. The other Victors tolerated Enobaria, liked her even despite her obvious shaky grip on her mental health, but Nero is the only one who truly _loved_ her. He's the only one Enobaria would have given her life for, if she could.

Enobaria stops, the dust and ash eddying around her feet, and she kneels right in the middle of the grey stones. There are countless things she could leave for him - he liked his beer, though he wasn't picky about it being from Two like Brutus, and he liked collecting dumb things like bottle caps and rocks - but only one that ever crosses her mind. Enobaria reaches into her sleeve and draws out her knife, and there in the rubble she leaves every weapon she carries on her. It's quite a pile, glinting in the sunlight without a single tree or building to cast a shadow, and when she's done Enobaria squeezes her eyes shut.

"I hope you're happy," Enobaria says, and her voice rasps in her throat. "I want to cut down the whole goddamn Capitol for you, you asshole, but you wouldn't like that, would you, so I won't. You'd better be happy, wherever you are. You noble sonofabitch pig-fucker."

Most of Enobaria's memories of her recovery are lost to time and medication and the slippery fingers of insanity, but one sticks out: the night she snuck into one of the shady parts of town looking for some degenerate's guts to spill, and Nero followed her. He'd fought her, stopped her, looked right through to the deepest, ugliest part of her, the part that should have scared him away and sent him running and let her take those lives and fall into the abyss but he hadn't. She still feels his fingers on her wrists and the press of the wall against her back.

He'd mentored her again before she went in the second time, and he told her to do whatever she needed to do to come back and he'd make her sane all over again. "Well, I kept my part of the bargain," Enobaria says to the ruins of the house that's become his tomb, and part of her wants to dig through the stone to find some part of him to take with her, but she doesn't. If she finds any pieces that will be it, she'll lose whatever thread she has and tear the next person she sees to pieces, and she can't. She promised. No more killing, no matter what happens, never again. That's her gift to him.

Enobaria doesn't believe in an afterlife, but if she's wrong - wouldn't be the first, the tenth or even the hundredth time - she hopes he heard her, and she hopes it makes a difference.

She looks around the wreck of the Village, the only place in Panem that would have taken her in, the place she learned to be a person again, and she digs her fingers into the dirt. The Village is in tatters; her district split down the middle between the people still loyal to its Victors, to the Capitol, and the practical ones who've decided it's safer to back the winning tribute, as it were, and pretend they were dissatisfied all along. Anyone sane would look at what's left of Two and declare it a lost cause.

It's a good thing no one would ever call Enobaria sane, then.

She does one more round of the Village, again pausing at each house, and this time instead of leaving a gift she takes one with her. A piece of brick, a chunk of granite, something from every house until her emptied bag bulges and its weight strains the muscles in her arm.

"Trophies," Enobaria says to the guards on the way out, pulling back her lips. They take one look at her teeth and the bag full of rocks and let her pass without a word. Enobaria goes back to her apartment - may as well keep it for now while the new government decides whether to lock her up as a war criminal or if Katniss's deal still holds true - and lines up every broken shard on the mantel. She stares at them until the light fades, then she turns and heads to bed.

One of the biggest questions the new government faces is what to do with the children in the now-defunct District Two Athletics and Personal Growth Centre. The smaller kids have been returned to their parents, their names marked down in a roster somewhere so their families can be forever shamed and watched, no doubt, and the ones in Residential are placed under house arrest in the Centre facility with guards at every exit. Enobaria heard they tried to storm the place, but turns out - fancy that - that it's difficult when the building is full of teenagers who've killed more than every man and woman attempting to take them down. And so they lock the door and wash their hands of it for now.

When Enobaria knocks out three guards and pushes open the door to the council room, one of them is suggesting they just bomb the whole place from the sky and save themselves the trouble.

"The children," Enobaria says, setting her hand down on the tabletop with a slow, deliberate movement that makes the nearest man flinch just as much as if she'd slammed it. "They're mine."

"They're animals," someone says, lip curled in disgust. "They should all be put down."

Enobaria slashes a hand through the air. "Not animals. Children. But if you want to see an animal, you say that one more time. I dare you."

In the new world, being a Victor has no power. No social cachet, no automatic respect; it no longer opens doors and coffers and wine bottles. Outside select areas of District Two that refuse to give up this one tradition on top of everything else, the tattoo on Enobaria's wrist means no more than the flowers and sea creatures that the Capitolians have inked on their skin. The only thing left is the fear. It doesn't matter if this is a republic where the people have the power, if being a Career Victor is one step away from being a war criminal save for President Paylor's decree that due to the deaths of so many, the remaining seven would be granted amnesty, if people mutter that Enobaria should be locked away.

She's not, and everyone in the room has seen exactly what she can do. She waits, silent, because a Two doesn't have to say it more than once. If these people weren't idiots she wouldn't have had to say it at all.

They don't dare. "You really think you can rehabilitate them?" one of them asks instead, a woman about Enobaria's age with a grave expression and narrowed eyes. Enobaria ignores the others and focuses on her, because she has the look of someone with at least half a brain. "Believe me, no one wants to see those children murdered -" a lie, but true for her, at least, and that'll have to do - "but we can't have a generation that wants to see the glory of the Capitol restored."

Enobaria curls her hands into fists, then splays her fingers flat against the table top. Her fingers itch for her knives, but she promised Nero, and it's stupid, but it gets her out of bed in the morning. She runs her tongue across her teeth instead. "Give them to me. Don't interfere. Let me heal them."

"And you can do that?" It's an honest question, not a challenge, and Enobaria meets the woman's dark-eyed gaze, holds it steady and for once doesn't try to play the Games-crazed madwoman.

"I can," she says, and makes it a promise. "I can, and I will. But they're mine, once I've fixed them. Not yours. They're not a symbol of the old regime's destruction, or the new one's forgiveness. Once I have them, they don't exist, not to you. Not anymore."

"Done," says the woman with a nod.

"But Madam President -" stutters someone else, and Enobaria almost laughs. It's President Paylor, the commander elevated to the top job after a shotgun election following the assassination. Just Enobaria's luck - then again, Paylor is the first one in power to listen, and that's something.

"No," says President Paylor, and the authority in her voice makes Enobaria ache for Two, for the familiar hierarchy of Victors now erased forever. "No, _I_ will not murder children." She stresses the pronoun in a way that makes half the room fidget and the other frown in confusion, and Enobaria's esteem creeps up another inch. She knows, and she disapproves. Maybe there's hope for the republic after all. She turns back to Enobaria. "I'm giving you free rein. Do whatever you can to save them. You have my word that they won't be used."

Enobaria curls her lip. "You'll forgive me if I ask for that in writing."

Paylor laughs, unsurprised. "Of course. We'll draft an agreement by the end of the day." She gives her council members a hard look, but no one argues.

Enobaria doesn't wait for the paperwork. She stays just long enough for Paylor to give her dispensation to enter the facility, then goes straight for the Centre. She flashes the piece of paper with the new presidential seal and they let her through, and her heart lurches when she opens the door to the meeting room and sees the beautiful, savage faces looking at her with hope and relief. For the second time in recent memory Enobaria's eyes sting from something other than smoke.

"Oh, thank Snow," says one of the boys, standing and pushing through the crowd of the younger ones. Enobaria winces; how long will it take for that saying to die out? She focuses on the boy, who's big and brash and coming down from at least a year of steroid treatment. It takes Enobaria less than a second to find the shiny gold bead on his wrist; he would've been this year's Volunteer, if the Capitol hadn't sent it all to hell. Even without the bracelet, the wildness in his eyes, the raw, restless energy and the need to _kill kill kill do something kill_, the desperate desire for someone, anyone, to give him orders, tell him what to do, would mark him well enough. "Are we going to fight? You're here to help us take it back."

The children press in close, tugging at her clothes, touching her arms, like just being in the physical presence of a Victor will make it all right. Enobaria never really liked kids and she definitely never liked anyone touching her, but she lets it happen now, grips their strong little hands, already coated with so much blood, and lays her fingers on their heads.

"It's not true, is it?" asks one of the younger girls. "What they said when they tried to take us away. It's not over? The Capitol's still standing, right? It's all lies, it has to be!"

Enobaria looks over their heads at the trainers. Trainer is one of the toughest jobs in Two, taking these children and moulding them into killers, knowing that every year they send another pair to their deaths and all but ruin the ones who don't make it. At least mentors work to pull their kids out alive. Enobaria was never sane enough for either job, but she would've taken mentor over trainer any day. The men and women in this room know more, see more, than anyone else in Two besides the Victors, and they don't have the luxury of hard-won nationally-acknowledged privilege to go with it. She looks at them - they shake their heads - and yeah, they know, all right.

"It's true," Enobaria says, and the kids clutch at each other and turn pale. "But it's all right." She bares her teeth so they can see the famous fangs, and motions for them all to sit down. "I'm going to tell you a story. It's a story about a liar, the lies he told, and how he built a country on them. About the people who listened, the ones who didn't, and the ones who did what they could to make the best of it." She lets out a breath. "It's a story about how you're going to survive."


	6. Chapter 5: Epilogue

**Epilogue: a broken bone, once mended ...**

History is not always kinder than the present, but it does try.

President Paylor allows the anti-Career rhetoric to spin into a wildfire, lets the districts talk of payment and retribution and restitution, lets them slaver and snarl like a pack of rabid muttations at the inner districts' heels. Drunk with their newfound freedom of speech, the districts flood themselves with editorials, with rallies, with petitions, and after a few months as the entitlement feeds and grows, when the flames are at their heights, President Paylor stands up in front of a camera and sends a broadcast to the entire nation.

How does it feel, she asks them, to know that the only thing keeping them from becoming the Capitol was the Capitol itself? How much blood will it take to raise the dead? How does it feel to know that with the least bit of freedom they turned into the wild, vindictive, reckless monsters the Capitol told them they'd become?

How does it feel, she demands, looking into the camera with eyes that freeze and burn at once, to become a self-fulfilling prophesy?

Across Panem, the people watch in silence, then, one by one, each would-be caster opens his fist and lets fall his stone. With a few words, the President douses every fire with icy scorn and disappointment, and the people realize that this is the leader they have been waiting for.

Slowly, slowly, the people of Panem trade walls for bridges, hatred and envy for forgiveness, tentative though it may be. The Personal Growth and Athletics Centre in District Two, the Fitness and Wellness Academy in District One - both are ripped down and rebuilt and rebranded and opened to all of Panem. The weapons rooms are stripped bare, the swords and knives and maces melted down, and in their place are wooden floors where sneakers squeak as the children throw large rubber balls into hoops nailed high to the wall. A boy from District Four shouts a complaint that a girl from District Five cheated, that she carried the ball for more than two steps and the point should be disallowed; she makes a face at him, he chases after her, and they tussle and laugh until the trainer sends them back into the game.

A team of engineers from District Three and builders from District Two are sent to the rebuilt Twelve to study the abandoned mines, and within a year of operation the worker fatalities have been slashed from pre-Rebellion numbers by eighty percent. Doctors are dispatched to the furthest districts, and the healer's stocks of herbs are traded for rows upon rows of medicine jars, pills and syrups and salves. Young Brutus Payne and his new wife found an inter-district library on the borders of Nine and Ten, and in the years with him as director literacy rates in both districts rise as children abandon the fields and the crack of the lash for the smell of ink and paper. His father, when they interview him the year the numbers hit an all-time high, says he could not be more proud.

It takes years, of course, for change to stick; years that are not linear because nothing in life is linear, though the history books are supercilious and self-congratulating and tend to make it so. The years pass, reduced on paper to a progression of tolerance and cooperation growing out from an anarchic, tumultuous time into the hard-won acceptance of tomorrow. The hatred and forgiveness ebb and flow like the tides and the moon, and there are stretches of calm and flare-ups of anger both, but slowly, slowly, the sea settles and a new sun rises, strong and warm and solid.

There will always be questions.

Who is it who dealt the death blow to President Snow that day in the square - did he choke on his own blood as he laughed at the spectacle, the sores in his mouth bursting from the lack of antidote in his veins; did the press of the crowd suffocate him, trample him, crush him to nothing in the panic; or did someone take advantage of the chaos, slip in and commit that final act of retribution themselves? And if the latter, does it bring them any peace?

(Enobaria knows the answer to all those questions, and her answer to the important final one is yes, yes it did; but not as much as when she stood in the crowd as Roark, who would have been in the Arena instead of Brutus the second time, and Brooke, the girl intended to go the year after him, swore to love and honour and stand by each other until their last heartbeat. A few years later, that same boy-now-man hands her a red-faced infant and asks her, without a hint of fear or irony, if she'd be his godmother. It makes no sense to the girl who made her mark with her teeth and a young boy's throat, but as it turns out, even someone like Enobaria can find honour outside the clash of swords and the smell of blood.)

Who is the mystery soldier who fired on Katniss Everdeen that day at Granite Pass, the man who was not moved by her words that day, the words that brought so many to her cause; the man so loyal to his masters that even when his brothers turned to follow the Mockingjay he used his last moments to bring her down? What hatred drove him so far as to try to cause her death when it would have done nothing to change the final outcome? And did it give him comfort in his final moments when the rebels shot him down, to think he had accomplished at least this small triumph?

(This one, only a handful of people know, and not one of them is talking. Not Brim and Rook and Ryland, who didn't turn yet manage to escape the aftermath, who bring the body home and save it from an unceremonious traitor's burial; not Mary who cries over him as they tell her the last great thing her husband ever tried to do. Not Shalene, two years old and confused and clinging to her mother's skirts. Years later, the Mockingjay says in an interview that her one regret from her Games was not killing Cato sooner, because she couldn't save Rue either way but she could at least have stopped his suffering, and Mary learns that a decade-long grudge giving way feels like a dislocated shoulder cracking back into place.)

Eventually historians and sociologists write that District Two was as much a victim of the Capitol and the Hunger Games as the rest of the districts, and their being too blind and brainwashed to see their own enslavement does not change this fact. The people of Two roll their eyes and don't try to argue, accepting the condescension with a nod and smile. The people of Two are rock and stone, tall trees growing firm out the sides of mountains. They are not victims, they are _survivors_. They merely pledged their loyalty to one who did not deserve it. Now, they're just giving Paylor's government the same opportunity - to use them as they're meant to be used.

District Two was the bedrock of the old regime, and gradually it is woven by Paylor's skillful hand into the fabric of the new one until it would be impossible to pick them apart. The people of Two find their place in this new world the way they always have, by choosing a rock, taking up a chisel, and making their mark.

Finally, the people of Two use those same chisels to carve away the last of the chips on their collective shoulders. The citizens of Panem build themselves a nation forged, not with blood and smoke but trust and cooperation, founded not on the bodies of their children but thousands of joined hands, and in the end, they do have peace.


End file.
